I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible thin….

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent..

What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth….

When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my….

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there we….

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where..

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is ….

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a t….

I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or m….

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in t….

The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen wit….

I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone e….

God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost..

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I fin….

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don't even have to love your neighbor to be….

Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for..

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golde….

I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to fi….

You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present l….

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whate….

That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much….