There Must Be No Coercion In Matters

People Knew There Were Two Ways Of Coming At Truth. One Was Science, Or What The Greeks Called Logos, Reason, Logic. And That Was Essential That The Discourse Of Science Or Logic Related Directed To The External World. The Other Was Mythos, What The Greeks Called Myth, Which Didn't Mean A Fantasy Story, But It Was A Narrative Associated With Ritual And Ethical Practice But It Helped Us To Address Problems For Which There Were No Easy Answers, Like Mortality, Cruelty, The Sorrow That Overtakes Us All That's Part Of The Human Condition. And These Two Were Not In Opposition, We Needed Both.

[t]he Family Is A School Of Compassion Because It Is Here That We Learn To Live With Other People. (68)

Theology Is-- Or Should Be-- A Species Of Poetry,which Read Quickly Or Encountered In A Hubbub Of Noise Makes No Sense. You Have To Open Yourself To A Poem With A Quiet, Receptive Mind, In The Same Way You Might Listen To A Difficult Piece Of Music... If You Seize Upon A Poem And Try To Extort Its Meaning Before You Are Ready, It Remains Opaque. If You Bring Your Own Personal Agenda To Bear Upon It, The Poem Will Close Upon Itself Like A Clam, Because You Have Denied Its Unique And Separate Identity, Its Inviolate Holiness.

I Have Become Convinced, Through My Studies, That The Only Way To Achieve A Safe, Just And Viable World Is To Live By The Golden Rule. This Is What Drives My Writing. I Want To Point Out This Interconnectedness, Point Out The Beauty Of The Faith In All Traditions Without Exception, Show The Complexity Of The Atrocities That We Have Experienced, And Our Shared Culpability As A Species.

After A Time I Found That I Could Almost Listen To The Silence, Which Had A Dimension All Of Its Own. I Started To Attend To Its Strange And Beautiful Texture, Which Of Course, It Was Impossible To Express In Words. I Discovered That I Felt At Home And Alive In The Silence, Which Compelled Me To Enter My Interior World And Around There. Without The Distraction Of Constant Conversation, The Words On The Page Began To Speak Directly To My Inner Self. They Were No Long Expressing Ideas That Were Simply Interesting Intellectually, But Were Talking Directly To My Own Yearning And Perplexity.