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.

What people see in the news are places where things have not going so well.

The practice of leaving settled society to undertake a spiritual journey, or a spiritual life really, is something that is much more common in India. Common especially to a certain phase of life, to the end of life. But not so unusual for younger people as well.

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

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

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.

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.