My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down.

The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.

The inflections of community are important because they get at the very meanings of marriage. Marriage is a gift God gives the church. He does not simply give it to the married people of the church, but to the whole church, just as marriage is designed not only for the benefit of the married couple. It is designed to tell a story to the entire church, a story about God’s own love and fidelity to us

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.