When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, 'If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven,' there is no basis for discipleship.

Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.

When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

I thought I was going to the NBA, but God knows, I'm not tall enough. I don't know what I was thinking.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.

I think the public perception about asteroids is that they're kind of metaphors for acts of God, the fact that we have no control over the universe. They're always seen as these uncontrollable events. But when you look at the science, they're actually the exact opposite.