Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame-and pain-in a relationship...It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness...But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer.

A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.