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.

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.

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

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

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

Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: "Be not afraid." Though the traditions vary widely in the ways they propose to take us beyond fear, all hold out the same hope: we can escape fear's paralysis and enter a state of grace where encounters with otherness will not threaten us but will enrich our work and our lives.