faith and work on Nihilism

In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a true...

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

The only way to avoid mistakes and criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

The command to celebrate the Sabbath, and therefore to cease and abstain from all our own knowledge, work and volition, even from all our arbitrary surrenders and inactivity, from all arbitrary quiesc...

No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present ...

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it f...

The search for the good life, which so often is defined in terms of “things” and the means to get as many “things” as possible, has turned into a dead end as more and more people have more and more.

Recently a professor shared with me a college student’s reflections in response to my earlier writings on solitude and silence:  I was not born into a world relatively unaffected by technology lik...

Nothing will work unless you do.

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

In this excerpt, author David Zahl challenges the common belief that religion is “in decline.” He argues that while Westerners, particularly younger generations, may be distancing themselves from the ...

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. On the near side of complexity is simplistic; on the far...

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle...It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath.

Only faith survives; faith which is not a work, not even a negative work; not an achievement, not even the achievement of humility. . . . Faith is the ground, the new order, the light. . . . Faith is ...

Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.

If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, look at any office at quitting time.

I’m a paranoid agnostic. I don’t think God exists, but I’m sure there is some sort of force out there working against me.

All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every one, preaches our funer...