You can't really learn God's hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It's more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.

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.

And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.

When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, "If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do - we've been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we've learned a few things."

The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.

When one in three Black men are in prison, those larger systemic injustices become a part of what it means to love our neighbor as ourself. We care about dismantling institutional racism. That begins in relationships when you see injustice happen.

Faith is believing in the impossible because we have a God who is master of impossible.