But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me.

So she decided on a different approach.

Confusion is the chief cause of worry.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

And if you are already flying upside down and don't know it, your cleverness will do you little good.

Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, "Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn't it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?

The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.

No, you don't have to certain about anything you're not certain about. In fact, certainty is not something you can choose, anyway. Certainty and uncertainty are not things that are under the will.

Commitment is not sustained by confusion but by insight. The person who is uninformed or confused will inevitably be unstable and vulnerable in action, thought and feeling.

Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.