Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Although there are some enormously gifted lecturers and preachers who do create community with oratory, I like to do anything I can to engage my students with each other, with me, and with the subject. And the subject, I think, always has to take prominence.

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?

Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.