My Notes:

“My choice to follow Jesus has shaped the way I define evil…Evil is the absence of love.”

“The opposite of murder is creation—creation, which is the telos of love. And because art, true art, is an act of creation, it always transforms its subject into itself, even if the subject is murder. An act of darkness is not the same thing as a work of art about an act of darkness.”

“…when an artist uses his imagination to create a true work of art about murder, he is confronting death with art, making creation out of destruction, containing evil within an act of love.”

“From our first cry to our last one, life is little more than letting go, a long goodbye. The pain, the grief, the traumas physical and emotional that scar our minds: sorrow is so woven into the very fabric of material existence that to turn our faces from it is to turn away from life itself, In the presence of our mourning mortality, even Jesus wept.”

“It is the awful things that raise the big questions, that limn our doubts about morality and meaning, that heighten our suspicion of ourselves, and stir our secret shame at the half-hidden truth of our own nature. Humanity is revealed in its sin, because humanity is sinful.”

“To acknowledge the existence of God is to confront the reality of the moral order. Morality is not a fiction, or an evolutionary emanation, or a social construct, or a subjective narrative dependent on culture, time, and place. It is the human perception of a spiritual truth. Like everything else we know, we know it only in part… Because the world, for all its sweetness, is not at all what it should be. The very atmosphere is riddled with corruption.”

“Because it is not in heaven but in this world that we are called to rejoice, this world of such terrible darkness. It is here and now that we are commanded to make what we see into the beautiful. Not in a better past. There never was one. Not in a future utopia. There will be none until Christ returns. And that flatters believers with a happy ending. There are no happy not in the dreamy warmth of some hymn-singing Christian tale endings, not in this, the only life we know. No happy endings, no innocent cultures, no righteous people, no better yesterday or tomorrow. There is only this life, this moment, in which we must cultivate the peace that passes understanding and grow the creative joy that is Christ in us. We have only one sinful self to love. Only sinful others to love as we love ourselves. There is no one to point a finger at who is not our own reflection. There is no one to forgive but everyone… We are called to joy. Here. Now. In a world full of murder. In the kingdom of Cain.”

“The cannibal is the model of mankind, the truth we hide behind our social graces.”

“What Alfred Hitchcock understood understood even if he did not understand he understood it-was what Dostoevsky understood and Nietzsche too: that the long withdrawing tide of faith was the central event of our time, maybe the only event that really mattered, and the collapse of the Christian moral order would inevitably follow, was following.”

“Art, in the end, can only portray man’s soul in the age through which it is living.”