If our religious language is primarily symbolic, not literal, that means that its content, its meaning, is deeper,more powerful, more personally engaging than it could ever be if taken “only” as literal.

In concentrating on Jesus’ assurance that “then things will be better,” we miss his assurance that “now things can be better.”

For Buddhists selfishness is not so much sinful as it is stupid.

we have to do a substantial amount of spiritual training and develop a basic store of the inner resources of wisdom, compassion, and mindfulness before we enter the fray and take up the exhausting and the always dangerous work of peacemaking and Kindom-building.

Really, what Buddha was urging, on the basis of his own experience and with his own personal and practical insights and emphases, is his own version of the Hindu tradition of Yoga – time-tested methods of working with your body in order to work with your mind in order to deepen your awareness of yourself and your world.

a better image for creation might be a pouring forth of God, an extension of God, in which the Divine carries on the divine activity of interrelating in and with and through creation.

seriously, if we really believe, as we say we do, that the Divine Mystery is always more than anything we can know or say, then we Christians have to be much more careful about the way we use the adjective “only” – if we dare use that adjective at all. To announce to the world that God can only be understood as Triune, that God “saves” through only

being a grown-up means taking responsibility and thinking for oneself. That requires finding reasons in one’s own experience for affirming, or rejecting, what one took from Mom and Dad with a child’s trusting, but often blind, faith.

Words are like telescopes with which we gaze into the mysterious heavens: only when we bring them to a focus do we see anything; without a focus, by trying to see too much, we don’t see anything at all.