In the Valley of the Shadow Quotes

“Long, long ago, everyday life must have had a different quality, a different tone, from that of our lives today: it was ominous in a way that ours is not. At one point or another, it seems, anyone might encounter a stranger who, after a while, would turn out to be an angel/God/a god. I don’t believe, of course, that this was the everyday experience of ancient Israelites or ancient Greeks—I’m quite sure that most went through their lives without such encounters. But what these narratives are saying is that such things really can and do happen, indeed, they happened in the past to well-known people—and these very assertions must have sometimes made people think twice, not only about the unusual stranger they met at the market this morning, but about all of reality. The starkness was always just over there, concealing itself behind the drab colors of the everyday.”
― James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief