“Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.”

“We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come to us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in The Lord of the Rings (but named in the Silmarillion), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.”

“Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.”

“Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.”

“The Church has always had a conservative head and a liberal heart, and the world has never understood her, just as it never understood Christ.”

“Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all.Bertha: What's that?Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they?Bertha: In the philosophy department.Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers.Socrates: Are they dangerous?Bertha: Of course not.Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.”

“If one Egyptian tailor hadn’t cheated on the threads of Joseph’s mantle, Potiphar’s wife would never have been able to tear it, present it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown in prison, and let him be in a position to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, win his confidence, advise him to store seven years of grain, and save his family, the seventy original Jews from whom Jesus came. We owe our salvation to a cheap Egyptian tailor.”