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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.