You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.
The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person's soul, into their being, before they can effect change.
Reality is like a fine wine,” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.
The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he t...
In church, the rules of the lifeboat don't apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.
If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.
Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.
This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the message could not be presented accurately outside of the emo...
The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.
A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.
Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
I began to wonder if what we were doing it evangelical circles had more to do with redeeming ourselves to culture than it did with showing Jesus to a hurting world, a world literally filled with outcasts.
Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the...
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.
All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put ...
And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand r...
