If you're becoming weary and disillusioned with Australian values, Judeo-Christian values or Western civilisation, I recommend strangers - they're such a glorious, redeeming wilderness to wander into.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
My favorite book is 'Redeeming Love.' It was my first as a born-again Christian, my statement of faith, and the most exciting year I've spent writing anything.
A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.
The Spirit is Love expressed towards man as redeeming love, and the Spirit is truth, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Redemption is inconceivable without truth and holiness.
You and I are, by birth, by nature, and by choice, inwardly depraved, which is to say that we are entirely corrupt. That's not to say that we have no good in us; we do. However, anything good in us has been tainted with evil. It touches everything. Without the redeeming power of Christ we cannot halt our own moral slide.
I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.
I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.