"as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic.  Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets.  Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority.  Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist.  He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves.  He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom."

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