It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.

Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.

Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it ... The artist can then join forces with those who work for justice and those who struggle for redemptive relationships, and together encourage and sustain those who are reaching out for a genuine, redemptive spirituality.

We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.

I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.