From The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

"Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God … One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love's organic association with truth … You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine. Then again, you might not say that. The point is just that you wouldn't have to be crazy to say it.

From an interview with Speaking of Faith host Krista Tippett.

What Thoreau Believes

“I believe in the forest,” Thoreau writes, “and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows,” and this is a kind of ecumenicism, at least among townsmen who believe, mainly, in night-corn."

From Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Walking with Henry"

"Leaf by Leaf" by Rebecca Ziegler

"Leaf by Leaf"

Yesterday, at my feet,
an autumn leaf –
unique, breathtaking splendor:

flame-red, separated
from spirit-of-sun
by a jagged, glowing brown streak –

a Bradford pear leaf.
I nearly retrieved it
to press – to preserve its ghost.

But I thought again –
knew, in my scrapbook,
it would become its own pale shadow.

I passed there today
in a different mood,
gluttonously collecting glories

to press – a hint
of the season’s riches –
for ghosts are more than nothing –

my hands full of fragments
of the red-orange-gold shift –
individual segments of the spectrum

mottled, dappled,
streaked and various –
each leaf, uniquely marvelous.

But yesterday’s leaf
lay there no longer –
blown away, shredded, or faded.

When humans paint autumn,
they tend to impressionism,
laying on bright color in blurs,

or abstraction: color-fields
starkly juxtaposed,
barely discernable as foliage.

But God the Artist
(or Nature, or Whatever)
paints uniquely, leaf by leaf,

a radiance almost frightening –
so touched with splendor,
we soon look away, or generalize.

In despair of perceiving
their myriads, we snatch
at eternity, by painting or pressing.

God, unlike us,
craves no immortality.
God sees each leaf, then lets go.

"Strangeness" by Rebecca Zeigler

This rock was once at the bottom of the Sea
of Iapetus, says the geologist; it sounds so otherworldly,
so alien – another planet, or a realm of fantasy!

But the continents have no firm roots: they glide
about the surface of the Earth; they collide
to form new landmasses; they subdivide.

The seas of the Earth do not stay curled
in their own abysses; they come unfurled
to drown mountains. New trenches crack the world.

Here, just under my feet, lies strangeness.
No need to dream of alien worlds; this
rock, at hand, immensely old, records histories,

which, contemplated, make this, our own world, uncanny.
We’re not at home here; this fellow entity,
so familiar, so commonplace, embodies strange memory.

To this knowledge, one can only respond with awe.
Take your shoes from off your feet: you tread on something raw
with altering, metamorphosis – shaped by alien law.

-Rebecca Ziegler

Isabel Allende, who envisions the future world like this:

"I see a more feminine world, a world where feminine values will be validated, the same as masculine values are. A more integrated world. I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There's a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things. I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it."

Alan Ball/ Charlaine Harris on Vampires

“I understood after I talked to Alan that he knew what I was doing with the books,” she said. “My original conception was about exclusionism and how we’re often most afraid of the things that make us look at ourselves too closely.”

Mr. Ball said: “When I pitched the show to HBO, they asked me what it was about, and I said, it’s about what it really means to be disenfranchised, to be feared, to be misunderstood. It’s a metaphor for the terrors of intimacy. I sort of made that up on the spot, but now that I think about it, it does sort of work. That’s one of the reasons vampires have been such a potent metaphor and mythological motif for centuries. They show up in pretty much all cultures. It’s the notion of separating that part which keeps us safe and separate from another person, both emotionally and physically. And how there is a certain loss of self that takes place when there is true intimacy. And I think that’s really healthy. But it doesn’t mean it’s not scary.”

From "In Praise of Being Cut Off" by Roger Cohen

I became a journalist because I wanted to tell stories. To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.

"A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Study War No More

Dear All Who Have Been Born of Mothers,

Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their sons.

The following is the original Mother's Day Proclamation written by Julia Ward Howe in Boston, 1870:

"Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have heart, whether our baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly:
'We will not have our great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.'"