"It's what they keep telling you in church. Women are all heart and men are all body. I don't know who's supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.
Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps----overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Helpless, predestined Man, the king of Creation. Utterly fallen: a hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he's forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb."

"Harry is happy to go to Eccles' church. Not merely out of uneasy affection for Eccles, though there's that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it."

"Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the 'going through' quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blown inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it catches his retinas."

-----excerpts from "Rabbit Run" by John Updike