Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.
I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.
One preacher turned me on, another turned me off.
I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
I don't think I met an actual Mormon until college, and by that time, I was wary of them. I knew about the church through school and, secondhand, through non-Mormon friends.
I've had an experience that... I don't know the right label to put to it, if it was an angel or Jesus or what. Nobody knows anything for sure about that, but I know that I had an encounter, and I know that things exist beyond this realm, most definitely. I'm grounded in that.
After my engagement with Muslim friends, I pray more than I used to pray. My prayer life has been enriched by my encounter with some Muslims, encouraged by their devotion and also enriched by the ways in which they pray. Have I compromised in this way at all? No, to the contrary, I've gone deeper in my faith and I think my love for God has been deepened and made more intelligent in a sense, more rich by that very encounter.
I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since.
Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man.
never had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.
The framers of the Constitution
Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
Islam and its tradition have until now encountered modernity as a cultural aggression (al-ghazw al-fikri), not as a historical phenomenon.
I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'
I gave my heart to the Lord, and I remember the incident vividly. The Lord spoke to me. I know that sounds funny. It was not an audible voice or anything of that nature.
