“As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.”

“Of the seven deadly sins, anger has long been the one with the best box of costumes. When the guy in the next car rages at you, he's dangerous. When you rage at him, you're just. We can usually recognize the results of anger, especially in others, as destructive and evil.”

“People don't do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there's jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things.”

“Somehow we just don't make the same boisterous fun of Holy Week that we do of Christmas. No one plans to have a holly, jolly Easter.”

“Easter may seem boring to children, and it is blessedly unencumbered by the silly fun that plagues Christmas. Yet it contains the one thing needful for every human life: the good news of Resurrection.”

“The Christmas story has such power and such appeal every year. There are other stories we get tired of. You think of your favorite movie you don't want to watch it 15 times. ”

“In communities, at work, but particularly in families, people are put together in something like a three-legged race. God means us to cross the finish line together, and all the other people tied together with us play some part in our progress. They are oftentimes to rouse our stubborn sins to the surface, where we can deal with them and overcome them. Bundled together in families, a giant seven or nine or fifteen legged pack, we seem to make very poor progress indeed and fall to the ground in bickering heaps with some regularity. But God has put us together - has appointed each person in your bundle specifically for you, and you for them. And so, 'little children, let us love one another' with might and main, and keep hopping together toward the finish line.”

“Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.”

“As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.”

“Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?”

“Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.”