The idea of going on a spiritual journey is really part of the DNA of India itself.

There's still plenty of people who have this deep conviction that America is a Christian country and ought to say so in its Constitution, etc. But that's not the legal basis on which we're framed. So the flourishing of religion, of religious diversity, is really built into who we are.

I was a young woman who had grown up in the mountains of Montana as a Protestant Methodist in a pretty good social gospel tradition. I became fascinated with the religious lives of others who seemed also to be very religious, yet in ways that were quite different from my own. That fascination led to relationships, in India and elsewhere, with families of Hindus, of Muslims, of Sikhs, and a lot of study.

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.

The issue of "who we are" has been an ongoing one. It's part of the ongoing identity crisis of America.

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

I do think that the U.S. has an opportunity as a democracy to really exemplify what a religiously diverse society can be when it embraces the pluralism.