Prayer unfolds in the stillness of the soul.

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.

You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.

Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.