Because you can poke someone's eye out legally doesn't mean you should and that it's right. The Bible teaches us a more perfect justice.

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.

We should refuse to get sucked into political camps and insist on pulling the best out of all of them. That's what Jesus did - challenge the worst of each camp and pull out the best of each.

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

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.

God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.

Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.