When we ask God to move a mountain, God may give us a shovel.

Mother Theresa said it is not how much we give that is important but how much love you put into doing it. So it is not just how many units of housing we create or how good our health care system is, it is that people have someone to eat dinner with and that people have someone to hold their hand when they die. That is what we are called to do and it is the love of Christ. It is relationships.

I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.

We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.

The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.