Maybe if we can find time to hug and cherish our families and the people around us, child suicide or college suicide wouldn't be rampant.

I'm happy if my book makes you want to kiss your family... if we can reconcile with each other no matter where we are on the globe.

I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.

I believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it's not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling.

I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies?

Though people are more important than money, I'm not convinced these large sums of money paid out to victims is the best. Listening to the some of the victims, I think we could have avoided a lot of this if the Church had humbly apologized to them, but we tried to bully some of them. I pray the victims are healed.

I'd say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I'd say too, is an extension of the pulpit...it reaches folks who don't care for organized religion in a different way.