The phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.

Grace has as much to say about endings as it does about beginnings.

Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How do you fill the space between, "God says it, " and, "I believe it, "?

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

The Bible provocatively evokes desire.

Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.

Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.

Everything okay?”“I’m not sure, but it’s not shittier, so that’s something.”She laughed. “Still an optimist.

We who lose our footing have lost our way.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

You guys should know we do [ cover Obamacare, and ISIS, and radical Islamic terrorism] because you watch CNN all day long.

A truly moral nation enacts policies that encourage personal responsibility and discourage self-destructive behavior by not subsidizing people who live irresponsibly and make poor choices.

It is not enough to have the courage of your convictions, you must also have the courage to have your convictions challenged.

Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in the bottom of the barrel, in dark tunnels.

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.

True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ.

I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.