For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.

Acceptance is an act of the heart. To accept someone is to affirm to them that you think it's a very good thing they are alive.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

If we do not become changed from the inside-out - if we don't morph - we will be tempted to find external methods to satisfy our need to feel that we're different from those outside the faith. If we cannot be transformed, we will settle for being informed or conformed.

It's better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy.

Waiting on the Lord is a confident, disciplined, expectant, active, sometimes painful clinging to God.