Q. What kind of Catholic are you — a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A. I don’t know what that means. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A. What else is there?
Q. What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
That's what I mean...
Q. I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A. Yes.
Q. Why?
A. It’s not good enough.
Q. Why not?
A. This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q. Grabbed aholt?
A. A Louisiana expression. . . .
In the mid-80s, Franky Schaeffer included Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book on his Recommended Reading list in the Christian Activist newspaper (this was before Schaeffer converted to Greek Orthodoxy, taking the paper's name with him). IMO much of what Percy wrote in that book is sheer brilliance. I've quoted from it on FR on more than one occasion.