What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

...when a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel.

...the current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up.

I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.