Christopher McCaffery

“You were not able to find yourself in my persistent traveling on the theological one-way street. Who knows whether you might not have already been close to those monks of the nitrischen desert? I in turn am able neither to join nor be inclined to your high altitude flight in a beyond of philosophy and theology. I understand you as a Catholic Tillich (and as such much more interesting and full). It goes without saying that I will henceforth accompany you and your work—in a bewildering participation or rather in a participating bewilderment—and look forward to every contact with you.”
― D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation

“Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late I have loved you! You were within, but I was without.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence