My parents were a little more on the hippie spectrum of Christianity - they weren't liberal Christians by any means, they were pretty conservative - but they preached mostly about love and caring for people, so I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy.

I remove a lot of the pressure from myself by saying I'm not competing with my parents. They are the persons who taught me my ideology. They actively practiced what they preached. They're the exemplars and the role models. So how does one compete with a mentor?

I think number one is what my mom and dad preached to me when I was a little kid: Just because you may have athletic ability and you may be able to play a sport doesn't make you any more special than anybody else. Doesn't mean God loves you more than anybody else.

We seem to be a long way off from the kind of Fascism which we behold in Italy today, but we are not so far from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power, and we are slowly approaching the conditions which made Fascism there possible.

My father, he's meant so much to me. He's always on me to be thankful and humble to everyone who's helped me and helped the team be successful. There were many things that he said and preached throughout my life that are now part of my mindset. It's a big part of who I am.

I have zero interest in performing in films to try to convey any kind of message. My job is to be entertaining. There's a very different point of view about messages in films in Europe than there is in the States. Audiences rebel because they feel that they are being preached to.

I was about 14 when I became a Christian. I had been going to youth group, and I'd heard the Gospel preached, and then suddenly it all started to click. God opened my eyes to see Jesus for who He really was. After I trusted Christ, the Lord changed my entire perspective on everything.

So many of us have loved ones and people we really care about, and the only time we show affection is when they are gone. I have preached at funerals, and you see loved ones who didn't even say hello to dear ones when they were alive. Give them hugs, kisses while they are alive and need it.

When tragedy strikes, or even when it looms, our families will have the opportunity to look into our hearts to see whether we know what we said we knew. Our children will watch, feel the Spirit confirm that we lived as we preached, remember that confirmation, and pass the story across the generations.

In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted.

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to 'believe in God' and 'don't give up' to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can't call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

You feel like a stud out there when people swing and miss. As I've gotten older, I've preached to our young guys that strikeouts are sexy, but outs are outs, man, no matter how you get them. It's a lot cooler for me pitching in the seventh or eighth inning than it is going 5 1/3. Your manager likes it a lot more, too.

Redemption basically is about holistic health, if you want to translate it into modern parlance. What I suggest - based on the Christian tradition but not often preached - is that you can't enter into the fullness of the Pascal mystery of the redemption unless there is a radical transformation of motivation within you.

I defend just like my brother Todd lived. He taught me how to play defense by the way he lived his life. I defend like every game is my last game, like anything can be taken away at any moment, and that's what my brother taught me. That's what he always preached to me, so that's how I believe the game should be played.

God is being taken out of schools; children are not being raised in church learning the word; many parents are living lives unto themselves, exalting substance rather than Jesus Christ, and those looking for answers are going to church and finding the word is not being preached. There are consequences to these decisions.

We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time.

I was raised a Calvinist. You might think you know what that means, but let me explain it the way my mother preached it to my three sisters and me back when we were at home: 'I buy my girls Calvin Klein clothes, so that's all they know. Then, when they graduate from college, they have to figure out how to pay for them themselves.'

For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination.

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

Evangelical Christian politicians who cheat often raise questions about hypocrisy, especially if they preached piety in public and disregarded it in private. When Jewish politicians fall, they shatter different expectations, particularly that American Jews need to work together to preserve respectability and fireproof against anti-Semitism.

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