There is a moment when the interior light of the "eyes of faith" becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and this occurs because man's thirst, as he strives and seeks after God, is quenched as he finds repose in the revealed form of the Son.
I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called.
Both my parents are Catholic and staunch believers. I'm not a Catholic now, but I still carry part of it with me.
So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.
I had a calling, this is what happened, I've explained the story many times. I've had my priest on, I've had atheists on. When I explain my conversion to atheists, my personal series of events, they go, "Oh, alright."
I'm still very much a Christian and have a great relationship with God. I love Him, but one of my flaws is that I cuss.
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
I came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student, and a year later, I was a student at Dartmouth. I would say that the rather weak foundation of my Christianity was effectively battered at Dartmouth. I've had mostly a secular career. But I became intellectually interested in Christianity again in my mid-30s.
You may be frustrated with religion, but don't take that out on God.
I didn't have a rigidly enforced religious parental pressure, but I did have a few years in my mid-teens of turning to religion, and it was very meaningful to me.
I have the faith of a Breton peasant and by the time I die I hope to have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife.
I thought everybody would embrace and understand my reasons for becoming Muslim.
The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.
The truth is I've always been a Christian. What's amazing, is that the flaws that come with Christianity are really weird, because mine have a microphone and a camera attached to them. Most people don't have to live under that microscope.
Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright. And then you ask yourself in amazement: Is this really my own life I see before me?
I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose - His purpose.
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does
Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.
I kind of feel like God took away Metro Station and the greatness there so I could settle down and have my love life.
I grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Our parents always encouraged us to march to our own drums, though, so some of us are still Catholic and some are not. That's always going to be a part of me though; little bits of it trickle into my work. Whether it's an embrace or a rejection, I'm not always sure, but I can't avoid it.
'The Purpose-Driven Life' is not just a mega-bestselling work of Christian faith; it is the thing that every voter, secular or not, yearns for.
While studying at Barcelona, Ignatius was in doubt whether, after completing his studies, he should enter some Religious Order, or go from place to place, according to his custom. He decided to enter upon the religious life.
I'm still going to make mistakes, but I don't have any problems with publicly professing my faith now. It just took me a long time to get to the right place in my relationship with Christ.
Who you become is determined by how you pray
