David, Moses, Saul of Tarsus, these were all people who did terrible terrible things  -  they were murderers. The Bible would be a lot shorter without grace.

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.

The question becomes not just how to accumulate more, but how to covet less.

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

I don't know if you've read the Bible, and if you haven't, I think you may be in a better place than those of us who have read it so much that it has become stale.

I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.

There is a certain power when old and young come together - we can do more together than we can on our own.