Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

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.

Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not wizards, they should not try.

My real mantra for my life is "empower others".

There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.

L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things.

Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation.

I thought Jeb Bush would have made a good president. He was on the board of my foundation. He's very conservative, much too conservative for me.

The real pride, the real present, is your health and your longevity.

There are thousands of books on the joy of gardening and cooking. Alas, there are only few on the joy of living.

Surely common sense as well as anthropological evidence documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or carouse through song.

But when you're alone in the world, really alone, you have no choice but to be open to suggestions.