“In big ways and small, I knew exactly how selfish a war could make me, and I saw all around me how fear and need drove other people to terrible betrayals. Yet over and over, I also saw how war crea...”

“To figure out what was really happening behind the clichs, I'd learned, meant a practice of looking not at the center but at the edges of thingsat the unlikeliest and weakest people, not the most a...”

“I'd gone to Central America because I didn't think politics was simply a matter of opinion. It wasn't about having the right "line," having an ideologically pure analysis. It had to be incarnate. A...”

“The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it div...”

“What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: You can't be a Christian by yourself.”

“I read the story about the loaves and fishes and thought about Jesus gazing at the hungry crowd, saying to his anxious, doubting, screwed-up followers: "You give them something to eat." So we did.”

“The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best ...”

“I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.”

“Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.”

“Another decent possibility my critics implicitly deny is that of work as a giftThey assumeand this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economythat the only help worth giving is not given a...”

“Happiness doesn't result from what we get, but from what we give.”

“You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.”

“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness,...”

“Hungry men are not known for their patience or their kindness.”

“Hunger does not come from body; it comes from mind. Once a person starts to feel hungry all the time, nothing satisfies him whatsoever. This hunger covers up all the aspects of life ... The only th...”