This quote is from Mathew Walther's article "Stardust to Stardust" in the May 2017 issue of First Things and it contains one of the best descriptions of the experience of liberal Christianity I have read.  He has been describing ther "Glitter+Ash Wednesday" service sponsored by the New York-based gay rights organization, Parity, which met at Rutgers Presbyterian Church.  He has sat down in a pew in the mostly empty church and observes:

Five minutes pass in silence.  It's cold in here, and I'm already feeling uneasy.  There is something unsettling about liberal Christianity, and at moements like this you feel it:  the crepuscular gloom, the all-pervading feeling of desperate but resigned optimism, the hope against hope from something ineffable.  You find it in Bultman, in John Robinson's absurd- and in their way moving- books, on the lips of Iris Murdoch's faithless priests.  It's not just sadness; it's also fear.  When Tillich says 'Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being,' he wants us to choose being.  The alternative, I guess, is to let yourself be devoured by whatever might be lurking in the gray and black rectangles of half-gloom spreading over the empty pews behind me.