“Seeking out people with different views, different perspectives, different ideas is often challenging, because it requires us to set aside judgment and open our minds. But we have to remind ourselves that to get beyond where we are, where I believe most of us are, we would all be be well served to choose our music carefully, to stop talking and listen to one another.”

“We all know - or at least we are told continuously - that we are a divided people. And we know there's a degree of truth in it. We have too often allowed our differences to prevail among us. We have too often allowed ambitious men to play off those differences for political gain. We have too often retreated behind our differences when no one really tried to lead us beyond them.”

“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...If we had known who we really were.”

“Whether or not any of us become racists is a choice we make. And we are called to choose again and again where we stand on the issue of racism at different moments in our life.”

“One of the greatest challenges today is the relationship between unity and diversity. If we don't have a sense of what holds us together, what unites us - our common humanity and a common earth, a common creation, a common cosmos - then our differences, our diversity, will become cause for division and conflict, one seeking to dominate the other. But if we have a sense of what unites us, then our differences, our diversity, will enrich our lives.-Bishop Mark S Hanson”

“Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.”