A Change of Eye

From Good and Evil by Martin Buber:

In vain he seeks another relation to God's omnipotence and man's destiny, one that might open out a prospect from this ambiguous existence into a future life filled with meaning. He is about to fall a prey to despair. Then unexpectedly, under the influence of an unprecedented illumination, there takes place in him a change which leads him on the way of God, towards His presence. With the change of heart there is a change of eye, and to his new view there is meaning in what for long was meaningless. Everything depends on the inner change; when this has taken place, and only then, the world changes.

The Defense of Tradition

From Lee Harris, author of The Suicide of Reason (via Instapundit):

If traditional marriage needs to be defended by good arguments, then it stands or falls on the validity of these arguments, and where good arguments can be put forward to justify alternative "experiments in living," then the authority of tradition as tradition is overthrown, and whoever comes up with the best argument carries the day.

Charles Taylor: A Secular Age

From the Introduction:

First, I don't see the cogency of the supposed arguments from, say, the findings of Darwin to the alleged refutations of religion. And secondly, partly for this reason, I don't see this as an adequate explanation for why in fact people abandoned their faith, even when they themselves articulate what happened in such terms as "Darwin refuted the Bible", as allegedly said by a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s. Of course bad arguments can figure as crucial in perfectly good psychological or historical explanations. But bad arguments like this, which leave out so many viable possibilities between fundamentalism and atheism, cry out for some account why these other roads were not travelled.