Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.

Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God's people.

One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.

The real enemies of our life are the 'oughts' and the 'ifs.' They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.

Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

My mom, how she raised me, my brothers, my cousins, when I was a kid with one bedroom for 12 people... You think about all that, and God blessed me to get somewhere and do something I love and do something I've done since I was a kid. And blessed me with the talent to do it.

I was raised in a very religious household - it wasn't dogma, but we were raised Christian; we went to church every Sunday, Bible study, Bible camp every summer.

During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.