Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.

The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.

Think objectively.Think operationally.Think optimistically.Think outstandingly.

I do not want to be the angel of any home: I want for myself what I want for other women, absolute equality. After that is secured, then men and women can take turns being angels.

There's no success story. Everybody's got a ghetto story. You always want to make it bigger than what it is.

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

It could have been the whole thing where you stabbed him.

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

People want security in this insecure world.

I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.

All of the artists that I've worked with have an incredible work ethic. And Madonna has the best work ethic of them all. I've learned a lot from being around her.

Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.