“a soul leaves the body only to return with a message – is a narrative arc that pervades all ages, literatures and cultures”
“A rational response to the silence of death. Though endless in style and form, it was long unified by one inalterable truth: it can never be verified or thoroughly denounced.”
“Evangelical Christians school their minds and senses to experience the supernatural, she writes. But there is a contradiction at the centre of the evangelical Christian experience:”
“This God is so real, so accessible, and so present, and so seamlessly blends the supernatural with the everyday, that the paradox places the need for the suspension of disbelief at the centre of the Christian experience. The supernatural is presented as the natural, and yet the believer knows that it is not.”
“By imagining God as ‘hyperreal’, He is imagined as realer than real, ‘so real that it is impossible not to understand that you may be fooling yourself, so real that you are left suspended between what is real and what is your imagination’.”
“‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,’ laments the English author Julian Barnes in the opening to his collection of essays on looming death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008).”