Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.

For a lot of people in our world today, God has become about believing the right stuff so you don't get in trouble.

We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

And a lot of times, the religious discussion is almost a masquerade for the real question, is what stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell each other and what convictions and beliefs actually have the capacity to make us the kind of people who together can make the world the kind of world we all want it to be?