What really got under Londa’s skin, I soon learned, was not the Messiah’s sermon per se but the discontinuity between its sublime directives and the … - James Morrow

Late in my senior year, I went through a crisis of doubt when my provisional girlfriend, a willowy physics major named Morgan Piziks, informed me at the end of our fourth date that anybody seriously in the question “Why?” should look not to philosophy but to the physical sciences—to cosmology, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, and the periodic table of the elements.
My mind went blank. Try as I might, I could contrive no riposte. I felt instinctively that Morgan’s claim enjoyed the nontrivial virtue of being true.

If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You.

When an upright citizen hears his neighbor has met with an earthquake or a hurricane, he doesn't stop to ask, 'Is there a hidden harmony here?' He rolls up his sleeves and tries to help."
"Exactly." With an athleticism that defied his years, Noah regained his feet and climbed onto the long, taut mooring line. "If I learned one thing from the Deluge, Your Grace, it is this: a man who seals up his ark for the sake of a greater good is a man who has ceded his soul to chaos." Slowly, cautiously, he tightrope-walked toward the rudderless vessel. "The hidden harmony defense is pornography, Bishop Augustine—pornography for priests!