If you go out and have unprotected sex with lots of people, that behavior puts you at risk. Similarly, violent behavior can spread. One violent act can elicit a response. It can spread to people in a peer group so that they feel that they have to respond. It can pass generation to generation almost like a genetic disease.

God can only be of service to me and I to him, not in the past, nor in the future, but only right now in this moment.

For people in neighborhoods where violence is prevalent, violence becomes a way of dealing and coping with their lives. No matter how wrong it is, violence doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people.

Christianity is wild. It’s intimate. It’s heartbreaking and soul-mending. It’s the wings to rise above the everyday and hope of a honeymoon with the God who has loved you forever. The party has just begun, and the best is yet to come.

My point is that the social forces liberals like to point to are real - I absolutely agree - but, at the same time, a good grounding from a family can make a huge difference.

Violence can behave like a disease. That insight gives a different frame of reference that is designed to take the judgment out of it, to take the good-versus-bad-people view out of it.

Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.