I remember the first church I served as a student. They had a fund called the Emergency Fund and had about $100 in it. They told me I could use it at my discretion, provided I dispensed the money according to the conditions. So I said, "What are the conditions?" The...
Love erases the line between giving and receiving. When love is present, we are all just sharing; there are no haves, there are no have nots, just people who need one another. The foolish distinction between who is giving and who is receiving, between who has much and...
You have the healing touch, even if you may not realize it. It is not a supernatural gift, but a common gift, one given to us all. We are born to be healers, along with other vocations, to help us navigate this world as vulnerable beings. We have the power to hear one...
Death of a loved one is a tear in the social fabric…it evokes two great needs, both of them very public. First, the body must be cared for and given disposition. Second, the community needs to tell once more the story of the life of the one who has died and the...
The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on...
What we don't need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human.
Don't wish me happiness. I don't expect to be happy all the time...It's gotten beyond that somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor. I will need them all.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's...
Solidarity is a group that stands together, and would do so for its weakest member. It is that community which resists the intoxicating lie of individuality—we live for ourselves and by ourselves. Solidarity dismisses self-preservation in favor of a new way—to sense...
God is not a being to whom beings can relate; God is rather "being itself." God is not a noun that needs to be defined. God is a verb that needs to be lived. from Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today