Alex Strohschein

“The problem again is one of direction; Christianity moves from God to humanity, whereas idolatry moves from humanity toward the divine. The image of God restored in humanity by Jesus Christ is a gift of God, not a ladder which we can climb to attain God. A proper theology of nature can never be a way of obviating the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, as if we can simply read God off of the creation. The Incarnation, in other words, is a statement about how God has chosen to use material reality to reveal Godself, not a statement about the intrinsic revelatory nature of material reality as such.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

“If men and women need freedom and mobility, they also need a sense of tradition and belonging. There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburban masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem at the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. Or rather, the poor have locality until the rich get their hands on it. The rich are global and the poor are local - though just as poverty is a global fact, so the rich are coming to appreciate the benefits of locality.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Of course there was no need for the Church to repudiate the harmony between the earth and the cosmos. Just as her doctors have preserved, often felicitously, many habits of thought and turns of phrase which are tainted in origin, so does the Church gather to her vast treasury riches rescued from all sides. She took the sumptuous setting of her worship from dying paganism, making a halo for the Sun of Justice out of the glory of the Sol Invictus, adorning her cathedrals with the signs of the zodiac, harmonizing her ceremonies with the rhythm of the seasons. But it is neither the natural cycle nor some extra-cosmic deliverance that is portrayed by her liturgical year: it is the vast history of our redemption.”
― Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man

“Sean: If so, that kind of magic thinking is a strategy for survival that a lot of people use. Some sceptics might say it is the very basis of religious belief.

Nick: Yes. Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie - if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood - is, in some way, irrelevant. In fact, sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, meditating, praying - all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I've never let them go.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage