HUMANKIND

'I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face...It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.'

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.75.

LIFE

'Existence seems to me the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.'
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.60.

PREACHING

'A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought - the self that yields the thought, the self that responds to the thought and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.'

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.51.

WISDOM

'...I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.'

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.45.

MINISTRY

'That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things.'

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.6.

NEW ATHEISM

'...half-hidden behind the campaign to deny respect to religion, there lies a far-reaching project: to deny not just respect but reverence to any person or text or patch of sand or lump of rock. In short, to eliminate the idea of the sacred.'

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle, p.204.

CHRISTIANITY

'The Christian Catechism which all Christian children used to learn by heart sets out the two great duties of men: to love God, "with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength; and to love my Neighbor as myself." Humanists may say that this is an absurd impossible demand, and settle for the lower, less demanding command, "to do to all men as as I would they should do unto me." This is an illuminating example, perhaps the most illuminating example, of how modern humanism adopts the demands of the Gospel after first draining them of passion. Hitchens tells us that "many of the sayings and deeds of Jesus are innocuous, most especially the 'beatitudes' which express such fanciful wish-thinking about the meek and peace-makers." But the beatitudes are anything but innocuous. They call for a complete transvaluation of values in which the poor, humble and meek are to be regarded as blessed; nor is this wishful thinking, for in many religions the devout have carried the principle into practice.'

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle, p.203.  

MARRIAGE

'The marriage-tie, the marriage bond, take it which way you like, is the fundamental connecting link in Christian society. Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era.'

DH Lawrence in Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle, p.110.

HISTORY

'We are now hard-wired to expect history to deliver progress, jerky, flawed progress marred by horrors usually of our own making, but progress nonetheless. We look back primarily in order to see how far we have moved on. And one central element in that ever-growing sense of self-confidence was the gradual exclusion of religion from the picture. Man had wriggled free of the divine plan. We were no longer the creation of the mind of God but the product of natural development. 

This wriggling-free was not accomplished without pain or regret. To extricate ourselves from religious belief was a slow and often agonizing proceeds which left many heads muzzy with grief, disorientated in a universe that was suddenly without purpose or pathways. In such a time, only the most confident ideologues of progress could remain confident that they knew exactly where they were heading.   

What none of them would have dreamed of saying was that we might be retracing our steps. That would have been a deeply uncongenial thought. For part of the ideology of modernity is that we are moving forward and that we are going somewhere new. It is our novelty that comforts us. We are travelers who are thrilled to be told that we have reached the trackless quarter of the desert. Besides, it is better not to think too hard about what we have left behind.'

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle, p.6.

BACK TO WHERE WE STARTED

'God's long funeral is over, and we are back where we started. Two thousand years of history have melted into the back story that no-one reads any more. We have returned to Year Zero, AD 0, or rather 0 CE, because we are in the Common Era now, the years of our Lord having expired.

So much about society that is now emerging bear an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its recreations, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. Often without our being in the least aware of it, the ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond, almost eerlily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs'. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recall theirs. It is as though the 1,500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human.'   

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, p.1.