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

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 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.

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.

Shouts of dismay rose as the red flesh splattered against the table. It was only a tomato, but one would think I was pulping a decaying heart by the noise the big, strong FIB officers were making.

Yesterday, I was clever, I wanted to be rich. Today, I am wise, I want to be happy.

People reveal as much by their silence as they do by what they say.

To have an independant mind, to think for oneself, not to follow fashion, not to seek honour or decoration, not to become part of the establishment

Health lies in labor and there is no royal road to it but through toil.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.

Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.