« Just as the secular scene assigns its place to the sacred, so can one not crucify a particular country on its religion of origin. There would be no Greek identity without orthodoxy, nor Indian without Hinduism, but Greece is not just its popes or India, but its castes. Nor does Confucius sum up China. It is the fundamentalists of the West and the East who identify a society with its divine difference, which they soon converted into a 'total abstraction'. Thus Mr. Huntington and Mr. Bin Laden get along very well to carve in marble a 'Homo occidentalis' here, and there a 'Homo Islamicus', closed and immutable entities, monads without doors or windows. The head-to-toe mythologies of identity-substance, which animate the crusaders of Essence, feed each other. Denouncing the lack of an objective basis does not make them less epidemic. Not albeit, but because they ignore the intertwining of reality, the enchanting all-encompassing "clash of civilizations", whose unrealism is precisely successful, mobilize all the better because they are idiots, and therefore reassuring. »

« the artist does not have the keys, it is I, spectator at the end of the chain, who opens or closes the doors. What prompted him to make this canvas can be communicated to me by her upside down. Painting his room in Arles, Van Gogh meant his serenity. I understand it as pure anguish. And I'm silent. »

« And what is better, to argue, or even to help each other in Babel, or to prowl in a soothed no man's land? It is here that we dream of an ecumenism that would not be a concordism, aimed not at diluting but at clarifying spiritual profiles. To better identify differences rather than erase them. An interfaith dialogue that, instead of producing rosewater with strong liquors, via the weakest theology, would highlight, what other theologies have strong and irreducible. This kind of meeting would require fewer smiling facilitators than demanding translators, like the Jews of Toledo and the Arabs of Andalusia. Is the Holy Spirit doomed to take the highway? »