For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong.