Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

I think faith helps me a lot. God wants you to be where He wants you to be, and that's where I want to be. If I do not get a part, I understand that maybe I needed to be home at that time, maybe in school; there's always a reason. My faith is also where my core friends are, at my church, a faith-based friendship.

Certain though I am - and ever more certain - that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

Glory be and praise to God. I didn't do any of this. God did. I don't have a recipe or a blueprint. I prayed for it, and my prayers are continuing to be answered.