And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

That's about 90 percent of my theological life - radical self-care. Put your own oxygen mask on first. I watch the self-talk that goes through my mind, and if I am being critical with myself, I shake myself out of it.

Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.