Alex Strohschein

“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

“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

“In the days before culture shifted centre-stage, there was an obvious dwelling place for the spirit, known as religion. Religion did all that culture was later to do, but far more effectively. It could enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate values, not just the few well-educated enough to read Horace or listen to Mahler. To assist it in this task, it had the threat of hell fire at its disposal - a penalty which proved rather more persuasive than the murmurs of cultivated distaste around those who hadn't read Horace. Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassingly ignore it.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Why does that evening's memory
Return with this night's storm -
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS
WHAT-IFS that won't stay buried
Other cities, other jobs
Strangers we might have married

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems