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For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us to places where we didn’t want to go.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Once the chief arbiter between good and evil, between the heartless and the generous, the churches have found themselves bystanders in many of society's critical struggles. Why not, with resources 50 times greater than those of the National Rifle Association, again speak with a force that can be decisive in a culture's direction and a culture's quality? . . . Not laid back, not defeatist, not dug in behind stout theological or sociological walls, not mindless or heartless—but open, active, committed enthusiastic, compelled.

In Luke’s account of the Emmaus Road encounter, the Risen Jesus could have said to his beleaguered companions something like: "OK fellas; it’s all gonna be fine now. We won. Relax and enjoy the glory." Instead, he enjoins them to Bible study—not once in the narrative, but twice (Luk e24:27, 45). Specifically, to the hard labor of radically re-interpreting their religious and political tradition through the lens of its prophets.

Disciples are called to “live your lives in a manner worthy of the Gospel” [Philippians 1:27]. But this translation doesn’t capture the concreteness of Paul’s admonition.

The Greek word translated as “live your life” is politeuesthe, from polis, and is more accurately translated as “live your lives as citizens,” or better yet, “let your politics be worthy of the Gospel of Christ.” The word’s clear meaning has to do with living as a citizen, or managing civic affairs, or conducting one's self as pledged to some law of life.

Paul makes it very clear that the interests and aims of the church are different from and largely at variance to the interests and aims of the empire.

When we are dissatisfied with things as they are, or suffer and know pain, we begin to imagine what the world would be like if things were different—if there were no hunger or thirst and all tears were wiped away (Rev. 7:17).

Creative imagination reaches toward God, and glimpses a new heaven and new earth. The new reality has nothing to do with the present order. In fact, the one who responds to call seeks to put something more beautiful in the place of what she sees. This is where the friction and fight begin.

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

The word of the Lord is penetrating and confronting and disturbing, always coming into the order of selfishness from the realm of God's own being. The way we have organized our society is fundamentally different from the way in which God conceives it, and the way in which God's own being longs for it to be ordered.

Sometimes the center to which our centering prayer calls us is smack dab in the middle of the world’s decentered, disoriented, disabled and dysfunctional life.