Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

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.

A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.

There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.

When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.