An Unformed, Inarticulated Hunger

Rembrandt

"...the spiritual longing that doesn't know how to express itself." 
"...being governed by fear and not love..." 
"...to sacrifice to others, to be obedient to a transcendent truth." 

There are several themes in NY TIMES columnist David Brook's address to the Christian philanthropic group, The Gathering, that seem to echo directly themes explored in The Assassin Lotus. For readers who've enjoyed the novel--particularly fellow Christian readers--I urge you to find half an hour in the next few days to read the transcript or hear the podcast of Brook's fine talk HERE.

"Everyone is born with that moral imagination. The heart flies upward, even if you don’t know the categories, even if you’ve never been to church, you’ve never read the Bible, and you don’t exactly know the forms of it. You feel the hunger. And so to me, that is what is out there in the secular culture. An unformed, inarticulated hunger. And so when I turn to the topic of what, how do you be religious in the public sector…in the public world, the question then turns into, “How does the Christian world engage the secular world?”"