When, a few months before my liberation from my last concentration camp, I was suffering from typhus and, as a physician, knew that a vascular collapse during sleep was the principle danger, I tried hard to keep myself awake by scribbling shorthand notes on the back of small scraps of paper that a comrade had stolen for me, together with the stub of a pencil. Later these notes proved to be very helpful when I started reconstructing the manuscript.

Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life.... I became disgusted with a state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from a remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if the were already of the past.

I will never forget the sense of deep reward that I experienced when I went to my publisher in Vienna with the manuscript whose first version I had carried to Auschwitz. I felt like the man in the psalm: " he that goeth forth weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."

...taking this for granted, let me ask the question, if there isn't- along with a sound eclecticism-a sound one-sidedness? Wasn't it the great and first, existentialist Soren Kierkegaard who admonished us by saying that he who has to offer a corrective should be one-sided- boldly one-sided- because such one-sidedness is not only his right but also his duty.

.... it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question .... now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question.

...that the church, altogether as much as the secular world, requires the awakening jolt of O'Connor's fiction. Most Christian communities have failed to embody, in both worship and witness, their own saving alternative to our "terrible world." They have lost what is repeatedly found in O'Connor's fiction: the gladness that God's goodness is even more shocking than our violations of it. The God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob and Rachel, of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary - this stubborn, relentlessly pursuing Hound of Heaven - is determined to deny all our denials of his mercy

[The Word of God] does not proclaim in the same breath both good and evil, both help and destruction, both life and death. It does, of course, throw a shadow. We cannot overlook or ignore this aspect of the matter. In itself, however, it is light and not darkness. We cannot, therefore, speak of the latter aspect in the same breath. In any case, even under this aspect, the final word is never that of warning, of judgment, of punishment, of a barrier erected, of a grave opened. We cannot speak of it without mentioning all these things. The Yes cannot be heard unless the No is also heard. But the No is said for the sake of the Yes and not for its own sake. In substance, therefore, the first and last word is Yes and not No.

"Faith is the confident assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1
"Faith if it has no works, is dead." James 2:17
"The only thing that matters is faith acting in love." Galatians 5:6

"Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"Western Society is without belief for the first time since the decline of active devotion in the official religion of the Roman Empire. Our situation is unprecedented. There is no example in the last two thousand years of any civilization surviving without belief ... Western civilization reject anything which hints at either the physical or the ethereal. As an immediate result we have been overcome by frenetic, narrowly focused beliefs. The strangest social and economic fashions have taken on the full aura of religious belief for short periods of time. ... We know that this century is the most violent ever achieved by man. ... In this century we have opted not to control ourselves. Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than that of mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man's fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia. Signs of this fear are everywhere. An unprecedented worship of the past has won over the elites of every developed country." (p452)

"Faith is acting on something you believe and something you trust". ... Elaine Pagels (from a CBC Tapestry interview 2005)

"Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit."

"Faith is the state of being ulimately concerned." ... Paul Tillich. See also the Smith essay on Tillich and faith on the links page.

"Simplexity is the tendency of simple rules to emerge from underlying disorder and complexity, in systems whose large-scale structure is independent of the fine details of their substructure. Complicty is the tendency of interacting systems to coevolve in a manner that changes both, leading to a growth of complexity from simple beginnings - complexity that is unpredictable in detail, but whose general course is comprehensible and foreseeable."

"A yeshiva boy - a young man studying in a rabbinical college - took instruction from the rabbis. A friend asked him his reactions. 'The first I found very difficult, disorganized, and poorly explained, but I understood what he was saying. The second was a lot clearer, and much more clever, I understood part of that.'. "And the third? They say he is very good.'. 'Oh, he was brilliant! Such a magnificent, resonant voice - it flowed as if from the heart. I was transported to realms beyond my imagining! So articulate, so lucid - and I didn't understand a word."