"One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend."
"Sentimentality, not atheism, is the greatest enemy of the Church."
"Nonviolence is a way of life for Christians. If that community produces people whose stories it remembers, it calls them martyrs, not heroes"
"I had a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who taught Judaica. He was Jewish and always said that any religion that does not tell you what to do with your genitals and pots and pans cannot be interesting. That is exactly true. In the church we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals. They are not your own. They are not private. That means that you cannot commit adultery. If you do, you are no longer a member of "us." Of course pots and pans are equally important…"
"I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better--a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill."
"Hope does not necessarily take the form of excessive confidence; rather, it involves the simple willingness to take the next step."
