In America, one of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract, and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people.

I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

If the watchdog doesn't bark, how do you know there's a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

I was not a public - I was not a thinker. I was a doer.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

When all our efforts have come to nothing, we naturally tend to doubt not just ourselves, but also whether God is just. At those moments, our only hope is to seek every evidence that God is just, by communing with the people we know who are strongest in faith.