Prayer is the way to die to our own wishes and surrender everything to God.

What the church most needs is not heroes of faith, but faithful followers of Jesus.

Jesus wanted far more than to be accepted into one's life. He wanted to take over, and his essential call was to trust him enough to surrender one's entire being to him.

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.

We don't ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.

Love one another strenuously because it's hard.

God's idea of redemption is community-shaped.

God is love so all God does is loving.

One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their 'gospel' doesn't even need it.

Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church

... the Eucharist profoundly enables the grace of God to be received with all its glories and blessings.

You're still in prison if you do nothing better in freedom.

To be affirming and encouraging of others requires vulnerability on your part.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

My job, is to show folks there's a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.

Difficult, say you? Difficult to be a man of virtue, truly good, shaped and fashioned without flaw in the perfect figure of four-squared excellence, in body and mind, in act and thought?