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Author: Thomas Cahill
Quotes of Author: Thomas Cahill

Thomas Cahill _ Heretics and Heroes: How
Cujus regio, ejus religio {Whose region it is, his is the religion}.
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Thomas Cahill _ How The Irish Saved
For the great Gaels of Ireland," wrote G. K. Chesterton, Are the men that God made mad.For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.
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Thomas Cahill _ Desire of the Everlasting
It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that He gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that He gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that He walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that He longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.…
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Thomas Cahill _ Heretics and Heroes: How
In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least {venial} to the most serious {mortal}, to those so grave as to entail formal excommunication from the Communion of Saints and, therefore, requiring special dispensation, such as a writ of forgiveness issued by a bishop or pope.
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Thomas Cahill _ Heretics and Heroes: How
The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the "cheap grace" of the majority of German Christians in favor of the "costly grace" that linked Christian belief to social courage.
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Thomas Cahill _ Desire of the Everlasting
That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans {who "make a desolation and call it peace"} at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn't Philip of Macedon's first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn't Alexander's last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.
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Thomas Cahill _ Desire of the Everlasting
To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters-which were not all that important, anyway-was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.
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Thomas Cahill _ Desire of the Everlasting
The real purpose of religion-at the popular level-was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let's all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same steps, and wander through the same colonnades. Let the Jews have their god, by all means-who's stopping them?-and let us all have ours. And no provincial exclusiveness, please.
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Thomas Cahill _ How the Irish Saved
By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.
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Thomas Cahill _ Heretics and Heroes: How
Next panel {Plate 9}: Adam and Eve-painted by Masaccio-as they are thrown out of Eden. {Masaccio seems to have been, too.} The figures are less standard, even less accurate, than Masolino's: Adam's arms are far too short, his right calf is impossibly bowlegged; Eve's arms are of unequal length and she is dumpier than in Masolino's version, with a fat back and hefty haunches and an awfully thick right ankle. But they are alive, believable, fleshy!-and being pushed forward into all the horror of real life. Adam's stomach, sucked in and emphasizing his vulnerable ribs, displays the tension of inconsolable grief; Eve's hands, placed to shield her belles choses {and copied by Masaccio from the teasing poses of ancient Venuses}, have been transformed into demonstrations of irremediable shame. Her breast, peeking out above her wrist, is a real breast; and Adam's genitals are downright funky-not smoothly attractive, not ready for the style section of the Sunday newspaper, just their grotty selves. Never before had such nudes been seen or even thought of. How far they are from the ideal figures of the ancients, as well as from the self-censoring expressions of so many Christian centuries.
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Thomas Cahill _ Heretics and Heroes: How
Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it.
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Thomas Cahill _ Desire of the Everlasting
Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are Christ-like. Only if we put Christ before all practical considerations-only if we clear a place for him in our hearts {rather than clear the table}-will we be able to behave as the Samaritan does. For us who {like Luke and his gentile readers} live in the time after Jesus, without the comfort of his physical presence, clearing a place for Jesus means praying. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus, despite the constant outpouring of his energy in preaching and healing, always finds time to "withdraw to some lonely place to pray." So, immediately after the story of Martha and Mary, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray:
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