Kindness is the stuff of moments, but it can be absolutely transformative in moments. Beautiful lives are transformative in moments. But we have to train ourselves to look for them.
Healing, said the poet, is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
There are near enemies to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path.
Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.
But what we did is we studied our town. We did an inventory of all of the things that were present there—farms and marshes and springs and historic sites, Indian trails, buildings, our tobacco farms i...
At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account...
Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It's really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to b...
The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.
I don’t know why it is, how it is, but it’s the authentic, the unique, the different that makes us feel enriched when we encounter it. And a bland, plastic, synthetic, universal can’t-tell-one-brand-o...
Miroslav Volf puts a finer, harder point on this: we are substantially defined not only by those we love but by who our enemies are. Our own identities are shaped by our interactions with them. As a C...
But our world is abundant with beauty and courage and grace. I’m aware of a growing aspiration to attend, with all the tools we have at hand, to the human change that makes social change possible. The...
The balance of our world frequently is seen as a question of power. If I have more power and more knowledge, more capacity, then I can do more. And when we have power, we can very quickly push people...
I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. I...
By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. I sum up the Jewish imperat...
Fear usually looks like anger.
We now know that doing good to others, having a network of strong and supportive relationships, and having a sense that one’s life is worthwhile are the three greatest determinants of happiness.
Maybe this is another way to think about original sin—the ingrained lure of the possibility of going numb, a habit of acquiescence to it.
Contentment is not something I’ve known much in my life and not something I ever really knew I wanted. This, too, is the body’s grace—a gift of physiology, right there alongside my fading hair and ski...
Tikkun Olam. There is a Jewish legend behind this notion. Sometime early in the life of the world, something happened to shatter the light of the universe into countless pieces. They lodged as sparks...
I’m drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies...