Places where one can experience some of that separation from the world of the familiar, to defamiliarize ourselves with what we take for granted and enter into the ebb and flow of another culture, it certainly is one of the more valuable things that we do as human beings.

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

Be prepared for changes.

There are two great things that we need to find in life: one is love, probably the most important, and the second is work, and they compete with one another from time to time.

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 idea that the United States government would have to figure out what to do about the headscarf is simply ludicrous. We don't get involved in that.

People came as immigrants from all over the world, and Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and Sikh communities became part of the landscape of the U.S.