"When I look at humankind’s great achievements, I also see the hand of God, and what astonishes me isn’t that He had to literally and specifically intervene—it’s that He didn’t."

"The miracle of the pyramids and Machu Picchu and the Mona Lisa isn’t God’s literal presence, but the capacity for genius He instilled in every human being whether or not they asked for it, whether or not they think He exists. There is an assumption of individualized divine intervention in Carson’s telling of his own life story, in the myths he’s created about himself. The fight with his mother, the knife hitting the belt-buckle: Carson has imposed a radical conversion story onto his trajectory, complete with miracles, because—I can only guess—the more mundane explanation (he was a smart kid who became a brilliant brain surgeon) is not satisfying to him. You can see the 'thug' tale as self-aggrandizing, but to me it is strangely self-denying—on some level, a kind of blasphemy. In making up a story filled with drama, he has failed to credit God for the original and true, if subtle, miracle within Carson: that a soft-spoken, nerdy young man born in inner Detroit did not have to become a thug at some point, that he was wise and respectful of his own potential without needing God to perform a parlor trick."

Writes Ana Marie Cox in "Ben Carson Thinks You’re the Crazy One/The real reason we should mock Ben Carson's pyramid theory? Because it reveals a very dim view of humankind." Read the whole thing. Apt analysis from a religious point of view.

"It feels to me like a lot of people talking and nobody listening. It’s just a little quippy for me."

Says Aaron Sorkin, about Twitter, after Ana Marie Cox prompts him to think about Twitter as a "shared experience" similar to the traditional function of television (that "national hearth").