There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.

We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

That is part of our critique of some of the charity and service work is that we can still keep relationships at a distance by creating programs that offer services but we don't really create a reconciled community.

It is the church's job, as Dr. [Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.

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.

Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.