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

You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.

Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.