Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it.

Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.

Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being—confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented—is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.

If the supply of virtue is insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost nonexistent in an unfree society like Iran's. The reason is that coerced virtues are not virtues at all.

Christ remains the most influential figure in history. Any list of world-transforming individuals would no doubt include Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad. Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad, however occupy totally different places in Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam than Christ occupies in Christianity. Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad never professed to perform miracles; indeed they never claimed to be anything more than men. They viewed themselves simply as God's messengers. Christ is the only person in history who has defined a whole religion around his person.