“In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.”

“What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.”

“It has never been easier to get books but never harder to find the quiet needed to study them.”

“God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.”

“while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.”

“The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of the...”

“Jesus-shaped spirituality hears Jesus say "believe and repent," but the call that resonates most closely in the heart of a disciple is "follow me." The command to follow requires that we take a dai...”

“The engine that drives all your activities is hope. What you hope in shapes you.”

“I assumed my first undivided responsibility.”

“When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,And what is it to work with love?It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, ev...”

“But pearls are for tears, the old legend says," Gilbert had objected."I'm not afraid of that. And tears can be happy as well as sad. My very happiest moments have been when I had tears in my eyeswh...”

“Because the night you asked me,the small scar of the quarter moonhad healed - the moon was whole again;because life seemed so short;because life stretched out before melike the halls of a nightmare...”

“Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.”

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom," says Paul. And we are most in line with the Spirit, most faithfully obedient, when instead of trying to manipulate people into faith, we simply l...”

“Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.”