I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

God's grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost-benefit analysis.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God's righteousness are one and the same.

The truth about Obama's birthplace or Trump's relationship with Russia will never be established to the satisfaction of everyone, but Christians know truth of another order, that human beings are created in the image of God. They are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights--that is, unalienable claims on our respect. This is the truth that has made us free.

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.