If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.

The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word "God," at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.