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.

As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.

Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.

There are some  -  called 'death fatigue'  -  people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.

As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn't stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.

When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.