Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.

Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.

Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.

If we cant face our losses, we cant be present either fully to everything that is. When people have cut off or not made peace with some part of themselves, they miss out on other aspects of life.

If God is God, we cant be afraid of what we can learn.