“The Spirit reveals itself to us all the time, at every turn, but we choose to look away from it and only see the mundane because deep down no matter how much we say otherwise, most of us cannot at the core of us truly believe that there is something beyond the physical.”
Source: The Art of Transmutation
“The Tilism-e-Azam will never end. It will remain and you and I, with our captive souls will live on. There is happiness in living inside an illusion, who needs a soul? Rooh ki parwaaz ho gayi, yeh jism hai jo jeeye jaa raha hai, the soul has flown away and this stubborn body lives on. Mirza Kallan sighs, takes his bowl and lota, collects the coins from his host, touches his forehead in salam and leaves, ignoring the murmuring and protesting audience.”
Source: The Begum and the Dastan
“I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.”
Source: The Pyramid
“M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration.”
Source: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman
“Tell me, where are the lovers of the world?
Nothing remains of them but ashes and worms.”
Source: Preparation for death: or, Considerations on the eternal maxims
“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”
Source: Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
“What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under the
same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?”
Source: The Complete Essays
“Once, during my Catholic days, I was complaining with a Catholic friend about how terrible the teaching was in parish life. A priest listening to us said that everything we griped about was true, but we didn't have to resign ourselves and our children to this fate.
'You could go online to Amazon.com tonight and have sent to you within a week a theological library that Aquinas would have envied,' he said. 'My parents raised me in the seventies, which was the beginning of the catechesis nightmare. They knew that if they were going to raise Catholic kids, they would have to do a lot of it themselves, and they did. So do you.”
Source: The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
“If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation.”
Source: Beginning Well: Christian Conversion & Authentic Transformation
“I was silent for so long; I was not guilty but still suffering.”
Source: Hang My Heart on the Shadows of Light: A Novel