“Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.”

[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.

We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.

Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.

Advent creates people, new people.

This is the end. For me the beginning of life.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.

I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains – or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.

While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.

Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes.

The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.

Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.

Through biblical community in their local church, through honesty and transparency, sharing what it is that troubles them, being accountable.

If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture.

You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term.

In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.

Nothing is more devastating to a community than out-of-control crime.