I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.

Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.