Only prophets and lunatics hear God's voice directly, but for the rest of us, there are what the late sociologist Peter Berger once described as "signals of transcendence" that erupt suddenly and unexpectedly in the course of human experience. They point us to a reality beyond what we know. Expressing a similar thought, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter."