The first genocide of the 21st century was against you, the Armenian people.

An evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral.

The world is polarized. The middle class becomes smaller. The polarization makes the difference between rich and the poor big. This is true.

If we see someone who needs help, do we stop? There is so much suffering and poverty, and a great need for good Samaritans.

Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.

Let those desert places in our hearts bloom.

I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.