Alex Strohschein

“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

“Well, grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return. I have seen it often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There is nothing to lead them from the abyss. And beyond that, too, I think the point-blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I'm talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as a kind of inherent evil. That stance is a denial of all the potential good religion brings: the comfort, the succour, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness - not always, of course, but often. And, as we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere, in tribalism, in their identity, in politics, for God's sake, in possessions. Look at our glorious secular world as it stands today. To me, secularism can also feel like a kind of hardening around an absence.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That's the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“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