We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness - mine, yours, ours - need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life

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.

I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.

For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I'm teaching, and the larger world.

If my life is any example, the work that youth workers are doing is very, very important. It tends to get marginalized in the church or seen as less important than being a senior minister in a large, prosperous congregation; but I don't believe that for a minute. I think this is absolutely critical work in the life of the church; and I think my path in life would have been much different if it hadn't been for my youth minister, Burt Randle, and a series of campus ministers in both college and graduate school.

Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.