Martin Luther offers a powerful reminder in our temptation to go at life on our own: The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.

There is nothing complex about this most simple of moral maxims; its difficulty is in the doing, not in the knowing.

Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

Only when we cease to rely on our own strength can we discover that God's strength is always there for us.

In that kind of environment, where there's so much skepticism about information that's coming in, we're gonna have to spend a lot more time thinking about how do we protect our democratic process.

In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.

Worry is really just a form of atheism. Every time you worry, you're acting like an atheist. You're saying, "It all depends on me." That's just not in the Bible.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified.

Science bestowed immense new powers on man, and at the same time, created conditions which were largely beyond his comprehension.