Broken stories can be healed. Diseased stories can be replaced by healthy ones. We are free to change the stories by which we live.

We do not choose between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We simply choose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and hopefully endure.

To have your music used on television and in movies, that's our way of getting it across to people. We're not on the radio all the time. It's the only way to get your music heard.

For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

Broken stories can be healed. Diseased stories can be replaced by healthy ones. We are free to change the stories by which we live.

Few things are as encouraging as the realization that things can be different and that we have a role in making them so.