“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”
Annie Dillard
“The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are.”
David Brooks
“[we] are overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and bewilderment and a general loss of direction in life…[we] ask about the purpose of living. Do we exist merely in order to eat, drink, sleep, work, and die? Or is there meaning to life?… Why [are we] here in this world? Skillfully using a well-known passage in Psalm 8, our author reminds his readers that man is not as he was meant to be.”
Raymond Brown
“We’re all gonna die.”
Sufjan Stevens