“Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished.”

“The capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.”

“When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are.”

“Engagement, and its relationship to the accumulation and processing of information, is a little-studied phenomenon, representing as it does, individual skills rather than those that can be measured in a group of people. Currently, our understanding and measurement of human intellectual capacity is oriented toward group skills and toward activities that can be elicited on command, regardless of the state of engagement. Indeed, being able to engage one's focus on the questions of the examiner, rather than on one's own interest, is the primary measure of test-taking ability, and test-taking ability is the primary measure of intelligence. When we find that animals do not do well when compared to people in this way, we must not assume that we have really measured their intellect. Perhaps we have measured only our own limited ability to engage them.”

“Accountability is the natural product of agency and is the basis of the plan of life. We are responsible for our own actions and accountable to God for what we choose to do with our lives. Life is God’s gift to us, and what we do with it is our gift to him.”

“When calling for authenticity, we need to take seriously the brokenness and sinfulness of the human heart. If to be authentic means to be who we really are or to express what we really feel, then in most cases I’m going to vote for hypocrisy. Our prisons are filled with men and women who acted on their feelings and impulses. If authenticity is about being true to yourself, these individuals should be our models of inspiration.”