All my life I have prayed to God that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal and economically pragmatic.

I do believe that those who compare the religious Right to the Nazis have fallen victim to polemical heat prostration.

In the absence of truth, power is the only game in town.

Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.

All my life I have prayed to God that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal and economically pragmatic.

For paradise we long. For perfection we were made...This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives...This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for...nothing less than perfect communion with the...one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together...we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled...The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less.

Disguise is central to God's way of dealing with us human beings. Not because God is playing games with us but because the God who is beyond our knowing makes himself known in the disguise of what we can know. The Christian word for this is revelation, and the ultimate revelation came by incarnation. ... God is the master of disguises, in order that we might see.