Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who...

Principles are what people have instead of God.To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God’s or your neighbour’s sake the way a...

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and...

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really...

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to...

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in...

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft,...

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.

To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very...

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just...

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.

In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not for the sophisticated. Instead it is for those who recognize that in face...

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody’s voice in the hall that makes your...

Somos todos mais místicos do que acreditamos ou queremos crer (…). Temos visto mais do que deixamos transparecer, até para nós mesmos. Seja em momentos de beleza ou dor, seja por meio de alguma reviravolta...

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom...

God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not...

The Shield was another of the Fear’s names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die...

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things...

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there–the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen...

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around…

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give...

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it...

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could...

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You...

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity...

We weren’t born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from the Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves...

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the...

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul...

With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other’s cards.

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which...

You shall love the Lord your God” become in the end less a command than a promise.

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us...

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief’ is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us – not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving;...

…With a religious book it is less what we see in it than what we see through it that matters. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fairy-tale epic the Lord of the Rings helps draw the distinction...

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which...

Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there...

in the beginning was the Word,” John writes, and perhaps part of what that means is that until there is a word, there can be no beginning. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an...

War is hell, but sometimes in the midst of that hell men do things that heaven itself must be proud of. A hand grenade is hurled into a group of men. One of the men...

It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.

Matthew lists Rahab as one of the ancestresses of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5), and that may be one reason why there was something about free-wheeling ladies with warm and generous hearts that he...