The Unifying Presence

“The essential irreplaceability of persons is what gives love its vulnerability, its openness to loss and grief, its fragility and pathos. It is what separates science (the search for universals) from poetry (the love of particulars). It is also what distinguishes the God of the philosophers from the God of the Hebrew Bible… We are particular and universal, the same and different, human beings as such but also members of this family, that community, this history, that heritage. Our particularity is our window onto universality, just as our language is the only way we have of understanding the world we share with speakers of other languages. Just as a loving parent is pained by sibling rivalry, so God asks us, His children, not to fight or seek to dominate one another. That is the conceptual link between love, creation, and difference. God, Author of diversity, is the unifying Presence within diversity.”

The Dignity of Difference, p. 47