I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.

One cannot escape the harsh fact that as a ministerial profession, the priesthood has very serious problems. They are not new. They did not develop yesterday or last year.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That's been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

The seminaries must face the fact that they are not turning out well-trained professional clergy. They must realize that preaching is creative work and that some element of creativity should be required as a condition for ordination.

If there is not laughter in intimacy, it becomes heavy, burdensome, and dull. At my best moments, the love dialogue I try to carry on with You each day is comic-what could be more comic than a human addressing the Ground of Being as an intimate? It's a kind of blasphemy that I dare because you have called for it, and that is pretty humorous, too.