God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat.

Philadelphia caught my attention in 1995 when a group of homeless families were living in an abandoned cathedral. Even from the beginning they connected theology with what they were doing. They put a banner on the front of the cathedral that said, "How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday."

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.

God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat.

Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.

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.