Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

... circles of trust ... are a rare form of community - one that supports rather than supplants the individual quest for integrity - that is rooted in two basic beliefs. First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader. Second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice.

The kind of teaching that transforms people does not happen if the student’s inward teacher is ignored… we can speak to the teacher within our students only when we are on speaking terms with the teacher within ourselves.

A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.

In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a "Be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God" mindset.