Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.

I think Donald Trump simply needs to make himself look less bigoted, less dangerous, more comfortable to people.

What is working in the economy is a natural comeback plus some effects of the policies we've been following. But I'm sort of worried about the long term effects.

At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.

The new culture war is about national identity rather than religion and 'transcendent authority.' It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: 'Who are we?' But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s.

Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries.

I wish we had more [Dwight] Eisenhower Republicans in this [Donald]Trump cabinet.