There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.