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.

Deism is the belief that nature and God are one and the same thing. If you study nature, you're getting insights about God.

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

I'm practicing a kind of meandering faith, or faithful meandering. I just trust that something is coming. I don't know what it is. But I've been a straphanger all my life; I know what it's like to not know when the next train is coming, but I trust the subway.