Necessary

...we are reminded by how far today we are afflicted by a certain kind of provinciality of mind, a reductivist mentality that can conceive of a question's being worth asking only if we know in advance some routine procedures guaranteed to provide intelligible answers to it. It is indeed an exceedingly curious reversal of commonsense intellectual priorities that a pre-formed procedure for answering questions should be allowed to dictate the legitimacy of the questions that may be asked. Thomas is intellectually braver, even perhaps more irresponsible: there are for him questions that have to be asked, but cannot be answered. He is prepared to ask the question: Could everything's being like the daffodil—“contingent” is his word for the fragility of existence—be just a fact, a sort of brute fact, requiring no further explanation? Or must everything's being like that demand an explanation, a cause, whose hold on existence does not need to be accounted for?—his word for such a mode of existence being “necessary.” Thomas's answer to that last question is in the affirmative: it has to be the case that some necessary being exists, otherwise the existence of all the contingent beings that there are is impossible to account for.

From Thomas Aquinas: a Portrait, by Denys Turner

Telling the truth

Let us be a society that refuses to give easy answers to the difficulty of reality. Let us be a society that does not fear questions to which we do not know the answer. Let us be a society that would listen to the challenge raised by [critical people]. In short, let us be a society whose members strive to tell one another the truth about the difficulties of reality. For I believe if we do so we may discover we have something to say in a world that no longer believes that anyone can speak the truth.

Stanley Hauerwas"Bearing Reality" in Approaching the End

Questioning

I believe deliverance begins with questions.  It begins with people who love questions, people who live with questions and by questions, people who feel a deep joy when good questions are asked.  When we meet these people -- some living, some through history and art -- things begin to change.  Something is let loose.  When we're exposed to the liveliness of holding everything up to the light of good questions -- what I call "sacred questioning" -- we discover that redemption is creeping into the way we think, believe, and see the world.

David Dark
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

Unanswered questions

The unanswered questions aren't nearly as dangerous as the unquestioned answers.

-attributed to Thomas Merton

The core of revelation

In all that babbling of ours we miss the core of biblical revelation when it speaks to our faith and asks questions of us. It will teach us neither the historical nor the physical facts of how the earth began, neither genetics nor cosmology. It asks a question -- a series of questions -- that is; it makes people responsible (obliged to respond) and throws us back upon our freedom.

Jacques Ellul
Living Faith