“God is more concerned about our character than our comfort. HIs goal is not to pamper us physically, but to perfect us spiritually.”

“Everything we know, believe, want, fear, and hope for, our thinking tells us. It follows, then, that the quality of our thinking is the primary determinant of the quality of our lives.”

“What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.”

“Our judgements judge us; and nothing reveals us [or] exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”

“If there is a single factor that makes spiritual direction effective as a change agency for the soul, it is this: spiritual direction holds our shame at bay long enough for us to see ourselves as God sees us in Christ.”

“Jesus perfected his life and became our Christ. Priceless blood of a god was shed, and he became our Savior; his perfected life was given, and he became our Redeemer; his atonement for us made possible our return to our Heavenly Father, and yet how thoughtless, how unappreciative are most beneficiaries! Ingratitude is a sin of the ages.”

“In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221)”