Philip Zaleski

"We don’t know what the earliest religion was like, but certainly it involved some sort of ritual. As far as we know, ritual never exists without prayer of some kind, so we can assume they came about simultaneously, and both seem immensely old."

"All the world’s great religions have spawned great literature, and it seems to me that it is incumbent upon Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and so on, to recover the riches of their own traditions and transmute them into modern classics. The great danger, I believe, is to settle for ersatz or cafeteria spirituality. Traditional religions have had centuries or millennia to deepen and refine their gold (Lewis, who recognized this, had considerable admiration for the liturgical and artistic beauty of Greek and Roman paganism, even though he was hardly a devotee of pagan belief); whereas the latest spiritual fad or a subjective practice of cafeteria religion is very unlikely to give birth to great literature."