Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

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.

In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

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.

Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?

We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.