The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt.

At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble

The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement... has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century... It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today... But then came the First World War... What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history.

Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.

Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.

We must not think that religious concerns swamped all other social activities. They simply provided a focal point for them.