There are writers whom you read because you’re told you must read them. Having done so, they then become part of your history, along with foreign countries you have visited or great music you have heard. It’s all part of the never-ending process called learning, and a very good thing it is. But then there are writers who catch you up short.
They are personally disruptive; intellectually and spiritually disruptive. They cannot be fitted into anything so smoothly incremental as a “process.” Their claims demand a decision, and contingent upon that decision is a change of disposition toward a host of questions. The thought cannot be resisted: “If he’s right about this, then I have to rethink an awful lot that follows from this.”
― Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in his Forward to Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World
