In the ideal case, the virtue of purity enables a man to be in the presence of women, to experience their unavoidable beauty, while behaving (and, especially, thinking) justly toward them – you know, like real people.

That, after all, is the glory of science: looking to see what’s actually there…Any theory, theistic or atheistic, that attempts to assert a priori how nature must be, and which then purports to explain it or spin it out merely in accordance with the principles of a theory, and without actually looking — well, that’s an unscientific theory.

Why should these forms appear over time on an isolated continent, unless they developed there? But on the other hand, it is simply impossible for any reasonable person to look at this pattern of morphology … without seeing clear evidence of a plan. 

In my opinion, there are very good reasons for accepting the proposition that most organisms on earth have arisen through a process of descent with modification. However… Darwinism gives many intelligent people pause.

If Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain. But if Jesus – body, blood, soul, and divinity – is not with us now, then our faith is also senseless.

Still, there’s a bit of drama in having a list of perfectly ordinary things that you could easily do, if only you would do them. At the very least, my Boring Bucket List gives me something to look forward to...one of these days.

Sleep and I have a rocky relationship. I don’t mean getting to sleep, or even waking up. Melatonin, and not drinking coffee past noon have solved the first problem, and I’ve been waking up early, on and off, since I was eleven. It’s the need to go to sleep that gives me such trouble.

I do not grill because it’s the most efficient way to get food on the table Sunday night. I don’t know if it’s healthy, and I don’t care. For me grilling is an almost meditative activity. It’s a way of remembering that I am a man, and of being more human. 

A good scary tale has at least one virtue: It confirms the healthy human instinct, a memory of Eden, that human death is an abomination…Scary stories help us to remember that all of our idols will be smashed; even the noble ones. Nothing that is not everything can escape that dark entropy. 

I had a child’s usual professional interest in trees as structures to be explored, and as droppers of branches from which swords, and bow-and-arrows, and forts could be made. Yet it never occurred to me in those far-gone days to learn to recognize a species at a glance.

Perhaps the intellect and will seem to be immaterial because they actually are immaterial. Perhaps water seems to be a form because it is a form… [P]erhaps we need to dispense with physicalism altogether, and go back to first the first principles to see where we’ve gone wrong.

Before continuing, I note that it is possible to believe in just one god, without believing in the One God. A person who worships the sun, or the earth, or the universe as a singular entity is really no different than a polytheist, in a metaphysical sense.

Call it common mysticism. Call it quantum weirdness. Call it according to whatever cosmological theory you happen to embrace. But don’t call it architecture. Writers are not architects.

Something extraordinary is happening in our skies, and it cries out for an explanation.

It is difficult to think one’s way out of an ideology. Like wisdom, ideology gives logical and narrative coherence to a lot of disparate experiential data. And ideologies are paradigmatic, so that one feels a kind of intellectual obligation not to discard his scheme without adopting another. When faced with mounting anomalies, data that doesn’t fit the narrative, the ideologue can always resort to, “Well...what’s your alternative?”

Being, at the time, a fellow devotee of anarcho-capitalism, I was taken aback, and asked him to elaborate on these “problems.” That he could make only vague statements irritated me, and confirmed my impression that he was just being soft-headed.

She didn’t mean to destroy the world, but she did. True, when she spoke her Deplorable Word, the sky did not come crashing down. The room did not disintegrate. The large crocodiles standing behind her didn’t even react. But if what she said were true — and it literally cannot be true — all things would have come unwoven, strand by insubstantial strand.