“There is a big difference in life between a jump and a fall. A jump is about courage and faith, something the world is in short supply of these days. A fall is, well, a fall.”

“I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound--that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world.”

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.”

“First, if Francis were around today, he'd say our church community relies too much on words to tell others about our faith. For Francis, the gathered community was as potent a form of witness as words. He was convinced that how we live together is what attracts people to faith.”

“Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”

“I carry an invisible box of jerseys with me that say "Team Ian" on the front. My goal is to convince everyone I meet to become my fan and prove it by putting on my "Team Ian" jersey. If they do, then for at least ten minutes I feel like I've won their approval and love. If I have a run of people who don't put it on, I can fall into a rut I have visited so often I should have it decorated and furnished. For me, life is like one long job interview in which I'm trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me. The routine is exhausting, mostly for everyone else.I confessed this nutty practice to my spiritual director. He smiled, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "I never trust a man without a limp.”

“A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.”