Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Faith, Hope, and Charity)

“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Heretics (1905)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Paul to the Thessalonians, on ‘Children of the Light’)

“You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”—1 Thessalonians 5: 5-11 (New International Version)

The 1612 image accompanying this post, Apostle St. Paul, was painted by the Spanish Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect El Greco (1541-1614), and hangs in Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ertharin Cousin, on ‘Obstacles in the Way of Our Faith and Our Future’)

“I believe that we have a God who takes care of all of us. But I also believe man can put obstacles in the way of our faith and our future. Fate is always impacted by opportunities. Without having the tools to walk through a door, even when that door is opened, you will not have the opportunity to live life to its full potential. I grew up on the west side of Chicago, the inner city. There was nothing about it that hinted at where I would be today, working to feed people around the world. Some might say it was my fate. I would say, yes, it was my fate, but it was also my faith, my education, my parents—it was standing on the shoulders of individuals who opened doors for me, people I knew and didn't know.”—Ertharin Cousin, former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, in “Soapbox: The Columnists—WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic; This Month: Fate,” WSJ. Magazine, October 2015

The image accompanying this post, of Ambassador Cousin addressing volunteers at the Earth Day Tri-Mission Community Project in Rome, Italy, was taken Apr. 17, 2010, by a photographer for the U.S. State Department.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Henry Newman, on Reason and Faith)

“[I]t is our great misfortune here, and our trial…that, where power of intellect is, there need not be virtue; and that where right, and goodness, and moral greatness are, there need not be talent. It was not so in the beginning; not that our nature is essentially different from what it was when first created; but that the Creator, upon its creation, raised it above itself by a supernatural grace, which blended together all its faculties, and made them conspire into one whole, and act in common towards one end; so that, had the race continued in that blessed state of privilege, there never would have been distance, rivalry, hostility between one faculty and another. It is otherwise now; so much the worse for us;—the grace is gone; the soul cannot hold together; it falls to pieces; its elements strive with each other. And as, when a kingdom has long been in a state of tumult, sedition, or rebellion, certain portions break off from the whole and from the central government, and set up for themselves; so is it with the soul of man.” —English Roman Catholic convert, theologian, educator, and memoirist St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training” (Sermon on the Feast of St. Monica, Aug. 27, 1856)

It was welcome news late last month when Pope Leo XIV named St. John Henry Newman, an honor bestowed through a person’s writings, teachings, and research that have influenced Catholic doctrine. Only 38 saints in the Church’s long history have received this designation, including St. Thomas Aquinas, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Teresa of Avila, and Therese of Lisieux.

For a summary of how Newman “influenced the thought and magisterial teachings of the Church during and after his life,” please read this essay by Benedictine College theologian Matthew Muller.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Faith, Hope, and Love)

“When, then, we believe that good is about to come, this is nothing else but to hope for it. Now what shall I say of love? Without it, faith profits nothing; and in its absence, hope cannot exist. The Apostle James says: ‘The devils also believe, and tremble.’ — that is, they, having neither hope nor love, but believing that what we love and hope for is about to come, are in terror. And so the Apostle Paul approves and commends ‘the faith that works by love’; and this certainly cannot exist without hope. Wherefore there is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.”— Roman Catholic memoirist, theologian, and bishop St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Camilla Cavendish, on Faith, ‘An Even Greater Force in the Coming Decades’)

“Faith is set to become an even greater force in the coming decades because the fastest-growing nations, where birth rates are highest, are among the most devout. Sub-Saharan Africa saw the most dramatic expansion of Christianity in the world since the European Middle Ages during the 20^th century. Its Christian population is expected to double between now and 2050, to 1.1bn. Meanwhile Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, having made inroads in north Africa. By mid-century there may be almost as many Muslims as Christians. Hindus and Jews are also expected to increase their numbers — though Buddhists will not.”—British journalist Camilla Cavendish, “Secularists Must Remember That Religion Is on the Rise,” The Financial Times, Jan. 4-5, 2025

In some ways, I was delighted to read Ms. Cavendish’s headline, along with her speculation that “the hold of aggressive atheism may be weakening.” After all, I read her piece in the same week as philosopher Firmin DeBrabander’s far more devastating itemization, in the Fall 2024 issue of The Hedgehog Review, on “dechurching”— “a process involving entire populations, not just intellectuals, radicals, or other members of the so-called secular elite.”

What troubles me, I suppose, is that Ms. Cavendish’s argument boils down to demography being destiny. It’s the same kind of claim that Democratic strategists have made for a coming, decisive realignment for their party over the last two decades, and we now see what has happened to those hopes.

The basis for such hopes lies in the belief that current trends will continue unabated, but so often that does not happen in lives affected by social cataclysms.

How many demographers, for instance, would have predicted three decades ago that the 2007-09 global financial crisis and NAFTA would have combined to corrode Democrats’ one-time “blue wall” in the Rust Belt states, or that the sex abuse scandal would deliver the most devastating blow to Roman Catholicism since the Reformation?

True, Professor DeBrander cites demographic data similar to Ms. Cavendish’s in holding that obituaries for Christianity are premature. But I would like the data to be supplemented by counter evangelizing for the kind of belief promoted by Pope Francis, in a Church that fosters what he calls “theological hope” and “a change that promotes the dignity of individuals.”

I guess I am looking for the modern equivalent of Saints Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius Loyola—figures who rose, when the Church seemed overwhelmed by challenges to its moral authority, to offer reminders of the power of humility and community in teaching, by word and deed, the original core values of the Gospels.

(The image accompanying this post, the official portrait of Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, was taken Apr. 23, 2024, by Roger Harris.)

Quote of the Day (Margaret Renkl, on the Paradoxical Faith of the Bluebirds)

“Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.”— American essayist and New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023)

The image accompanying this post, of a pair of Eastern Bluebirds in Michigan, was taken Apr. 14, 2010, by Sandysphotos2009.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on Faith)

“Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Fascism and Political Faith)

“Most people desire certainties, feel the need of a faith. Modern education makes religious faith difficult, but has done nothing to undermine political faith. Masses of men and women think themselves too intelligent and well-informed to believe in miracles or the divinity of Christ, but find not the smallest difficulty in accepting the infallibility of a Leader. The worship of God is an intellectual impossibility for thousands to whom the worship of a divine being, called the Nation, seems the most natural thing in the world. The old tendencies have not been abolished (they never are); they have merely taken new and, on the whole, less desirable channels. Fascism digs these new channels for worship and provides, in its cult of the divine Nation, a kind of lightning-conductor, upon which thousands of reluctant infidels can discharge the accumulations of their will to believe.”— English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Verdict,’ on Doubt and Faith in Institutions and the Law)

[Frank is giving his summation to the jury]

Frank Galvin [played by Paul Newman]: “You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true.’ And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You ARE the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, ‘Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you.’ IF... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And ACT with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.” [He sits down]—The Verdict (1972), screenplay by David Mamet and Jay Presson Allen (uncredited), adapted from the novel by Barry Reed, directed by Sidney Lumet

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Proverbs, on the Need to ‘Trust in the Lord’)

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.”—Proverbs 3:5-6
 
The image accompanying this post, The Annunciation, was created in 1650 by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664). (Mary, of course, is the Christian exemplar of “trust in the Lord.”)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Rabbi David Wolpe, on Why Faith Matters)

“Why does faith matter? Love of this world, of one another, is the sole hope in an age when we can destroy the world many times over. There is no power that is only good, that cannot be twisted for evil. Religion is hardly an exception. But while there are many things that can doom us, only one thing can save us. Faith. Not blind or bigoted faith, but faith that pushes us to be better, to give more of ourselves, to see glimmers of transcendence scattered throughout our lives. Such faith is an achievement and a gift: it is an achievement of seeking, questioning, yearning, reasoning, hoping, and it is a gift of God, who fashioned this world, whose goodness sustains it and whose teachings could save it if only we—believers and deniers both—would listen, would love.”— Rabbi David Wolpe, Why Faith Matters (2008)

The image accompanying this post, showing Rabbi David Wolpe officiating at a wedding, was taken June 1, 2014.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (P.D. James, on How Religious Faith is Like Musicality)

"I certainly have found faith important, but I do have friends who are totally without it and who cope admirably with life, sometimes under difficult circumstances, and who live extremely good lives. It isn’t a given that if you have faith, you’re happy, and if you don’t have it you’re miserable; or that you have it and you’re good, and you don’t have it and you’re less good; or even that you have it and you’re comforted, and you don’t have it and you’re not comforted. I sometimes think that religious faith is rather like musicality. You’re either born with it or not. Some of my friends who haven’t got faith find it rather a surprising thing to have. Religion is a dimension of life of which they have no understanding, really.” —English novelist of crime and dystopian fiction P.D. James (1920-2014), quoted by Trudy Bush, “Reasons for Writing: An Interview with P. D. James,” The Christian Century, Sept. 27, 2000

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Stanley Plumly, on the Disciples’ ‘Faith Tested’ Amid a Storm)

“A storm blows up, the kind that makes of sailors
Disciples of us all. Three, four miles,
Twenty-five or thirty furlongs,
rowing in a wind that feels like crime.
They know they should have waited at the shore.
Fear, they know, is their faith tested.
Fear of the figure they now see walking toward them.”—American poet Stanley Plumly (1939–2019), “John 6:17,” published originally in The Atlantic, November 2001, reprinted in Old Heart: Poems (2007)
 
The image accompanying this post is Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a 1633 oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Casie Dodd, on Johnny Cash and Her Faith Experience)

“Over time, [Johnny] Cash…came to speak to me on a deeper personal level. During this same period, I was working my way—with some reluctance—toward a Catholic conversion, officially forsaking my evangelical heritage. My religion was (and still is) a complicated part of my identity that I’ve struggled to reconcile with the various cracks in my humanity. In an interesting way, Johnny’s abiding faith in a Baptist tradition—one cut from the same cloth that I was trying to leave behind—helped me reconcile the parts worth holding on to with the tradition to which I felt called. There’s something in his voice that evokes a confidence mingled with humility: an awareness that he can be saved from anything despite everything that he may do to strain that grace. That sound—the timbre, the depth, the conviction—made a home in me. It gave me comfort as I listened to and sang the songs that testify to a love that hopes never to waver despite the knowledge that it will eventually. In that respect, ‘I Walk the Line’ became a sort of shorthand for ‘Amazing Grace’ that reminded me I could still love my family (and God) fully even as I seemed constantly to be failing both. The fevers that will come can still be washed away in the blood once more. I knew the biography behind those lyrics, and perhaps that intuitively made “Jackson” the natural follow-up for me; I nearly always experience one song alongside the other. I barely know any Catholics—at least on a level that would make talking about such things possible—but I know the wounds that cultivate that kind of voice. The brokenness. But he just kept singing, all the way to the end. He knew it was the only way to keep going.”—Essayist, book-review editor, and Belle Point Press founder Casie Dodd, “Johnny Cash, Pray for Me,” The Oxford American, Winter 2022

Song Lyric of the Day (Gordon Lightfoot, on the Necessity of “Rainy Day People’)

“Rainy day people always seem to know when you're feeling blue
High-stepping strutters who land in the gutters sometimes need one, too.”—Canadian folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023), “Rainy Day People,” from his Cold on the Shoulder LP (1975)
 
I came to Gordon Lightfoot secondhand, through relatives who couldn’t stop playing him. The repetition of all those songs on the turntable got a bit too much for me in my teenage years.
 
Nearly five decades later, I see these tunes differently—shining with craft and, as seen in the lyrics above, understated melancholy, sympathy, and compassion. (In a different vein, I am deeply fond of his epic “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”) So I join now with the many music fans worldwide who mourn “Gord’s” passing.

(For a concise but extremely thoughtful consideration of how Lightfoot maintained his religious belief—despite multiple problems with his health and relationships over the years—I urge you to read Paul Asay’s post, “What Gordon Lightfoot Taught Me About Faith,” on the blog “Plugged In.”)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Reason and Faith)

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all...’Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Orthodoxy (1908)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Anne Lamott, on Forgiveness)

“Sometimes faith looks like myopia: I don’t see faults so clearly as I used to...one of the most important gifts of spiritual faith is forgiveness, and I have grudgingly tugged this gift open over many years, and many hurts, until empathy for the other person has become almost a reflex. I have also grown better at recognizing when I’m the one in need of forgiveness. Most surprisingly, though, I have learned to forgive myself for most of my disappointing character traits and iffier decisions.”— Novelist-essayist Anne Lamott, “Have a Little Faith,” AARP Magazine, December 2014/January 2015

Quote of the Day (Anatole France, on Accomplishing Great Things)

“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” —French novelist and Nobel laureate Anatole France (1844-1924), introductory speech at a session of the Académie Française, December 24, 1896, in Works of Anatole France (2008)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Tom Holland, on Faith ‘In the Face of Unspeakable Suffering’)

“[I[n the face of unspeakable suffering, faith has provided solace where no other source of comfort could. Perhaps it is necessary first to have walked in darkness to see a great light.” — Historian Tom Holland, “Our Secular Society Draws From the Well of Christian Tradition,” The Financial Times, Dec. 23-24, 2017

The image accompanying this post, a detail of the painting Christ Crucified, was part of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, by the Italian late Renaissance master Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594).