"A job is something we do to get a paycheck and pay our bills. Jobs are legitimate, at times, but work is why we are here in the universe. Work and calling often go together.

Another part of beauty is terror. The world isn't pretty, it's beautiful. Awe is a mixture of terror and beauty. You say that the opposite of beauty is ugliness. Right. I would say that all injustice is ugly, sin is ugly, tearing down the rainforest is ugly. To me, beauty is not about perfection, there's beauty in imperfection.

Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.

Compassion is the essence of Jesus' teaching, and indeed of the teaching of all great spiritual figures from Mohammed to Isaiah, from Lao Tzu to Chief Seattle. Yet compassion has been sentimentalized and severed from its relationship to justice-making and celebration. Creation Spirituality links the struggle for justice with the yearning for mysticism.

Creation is all space, all time - all things past, present, and future.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

Evil is the shadow of angel. Just as there are angels of light, support, guidance, healing and defense, so we have experiences of shadow angels. And we have names for them: racism, sexism, homophobia are all demons - but they're not out there.

I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it's like a mirror, saying, hey, can't you see what's here in your own religion, what are you, stupid?

I don't think that fundamentalism has anything to do with Jesus Christ. They call themselves Christians, but if that's Christian, count me out. Fundamentalism is built on fear and greed. They're telling you to give them your money otherwise you're going to hell.

I think that the Vatican is in a deep crisis of faith which they should be praying for. They don't trust theologians, they don't trust women, they don't trust gays and they don't trust nature. The rest of us who do and who are looking for answers should just get on with the work.

If you look closely at a tree you'll notice it's knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.

It has taken fifteen billion years to get you here. That is scientific fact. We are not just the products of our parents. Sixty percent of our body is hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms in us go back to the fireball fourteen billion years ago. We have been around a long time, and it has been a great birthing process to bring us forward.

My generation was bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over religion. We haven't succeeded in overthrowing the old order yet, and maybe there are some meanings to be found in my story about coming of age spiritually in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Our generation has been taught to think in terms of the evolution of the universe, but the fact is that physics didn't get into evolution until the 1960's - it was just this biology thing. Then we learned how the universe is evolving. Now we're going a step further and understanding that even the laws that govern the universe are evolving!

People ought to tithe because they belong to a community that they believe in and they want to see prosper. Tithing is a form of voluntary taxation. In our culture, we should spend more time thinking in communitarian terms about taxation.

To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there's only one river.

To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people.

We are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us.

When it comes to wilderness animals we have to make an effort to preserve what areas we can that they can be themselves in. Its come to a point though, clearly, where some species have to be cared for by humans if they are not going to disappear altogether.