“There is an ethical urgency to eschatological expectation. There is an awareness that if the ‘possible advent’ indeed comes as unpredictable surprise, like a thief in the night, it always comes through the face of the most vulnerable - the cry of ‘the smallest of these’, the widow, the orphaned, the anguished, the hungry, those who ask: ‘Where are you?’ To reply to this ethical call, it is critical to be able to say I am here. And this being present here and now before the summons of the fragile other, requires that the eschaton still-to-come already intersects, however enigmatically and epiphanically, with the ontological order of being as loving possible. Were this not so, the word God would not longer contain, in Augustine’s phrase, ‘everything we hope for’.”

- Strangers, Gods,  and Monsters | Richard Kearney