I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had -- Plato's white grandfatherly god -- because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids.

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.

Thank goodness there are women in our lives -- that's all I can say. We get saved by the women in our lives.

I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy -- schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus -- He likes me -- but He came to save me from God the Father -- who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down.

And the Law that once contained impossible demands -- Thou Shalt Not... -- actually becomes a promise we fulfill in you.

Jesus is not the 'founder of Christianity.

I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.