Be prepared for changes.

Those are big challenges in our age, not just how we live as co-citizens in societies with people of different faiths and different cultures - I mean, that's a big challenge itself - but how we think about all that as Christians, or as Jews, or as Muslims, or as Hindus. How do we think about the religious other? There's a theological dimension as well as a civic dimension to our pluralism.

My whole worldview has changed because of the work that I do. Specifically, the way in which I appropriate my own faith as a Christian, and the way in which I think about the faith and life of others who are very different than myself. That mutuality of regard is how we deal with difference and diversity in the world.

We are built on a structure of the freedom of religion and the non-establishment of religion. That really is a pretty sturdy rudder for the U.S.

I guess one of the things that is an advantage of the world in which we live is that I can at least I can have multiple homes. I can have that attachment to Montana and to Cambridge and to India.

I will say that the power of being a stranger in someone else's religious community has its own lessons, really. It is something like the power of visiting another very happy extended family and being at their table.

Some of my best friends are Hindu or Buddhist or Sikh, my students as well. This is the sea in which I swim.