Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.

A healthy skepticism is good, even God-given. However, a need to cynically dismiss anything we cannot personally verify is arrogance.

Unfortunately, many young believers - and some older ones, too - do not know that there will be times in every person's life when circumstances don't add up - when God doesn't appear to make sense. This aspect of the Christian faith is not well advertised.

We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.

Christians can have doubts and they can have questions, and the unhealthy way to deal with that is to keep them inside where they fester and grow and can undermine our faith. The healthy way to deal with it is to talk about it and be honest about it.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Students at universities are sometimes so filled with the doctrines of the world they begin to question the doctrines of the gospel.

When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I'm not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn't too rigorous or challenging.

I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe this: unless I believe, I will not understand.