Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.

Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.