You are much more likely to have a holy experience in a quiet, focused, and communal context than you are when you are being entertained.

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.

I understand that there are forms of entertainment that can make people weep or jazz them up so they feel like they have had an experience. But I also know that an hour later that's faded and you are back to the difficult realities of your own life. And we need to help people know how to go beyond those difficulties to a place where God dwells.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness - mine, yours, ours - need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.