The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.

If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.

I could, of course, have done no more if no less than affiliated myself in one way or another with a particular church, could have simply read books about Christianity, talked to Christian people, set out to discover something about what a Christian life is supposed to involve and then tried as best I could to live one. But, on the one hand, that didn't seem enough to me, and on the other, it seemed to much.

The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.