Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.

What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.

I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.

There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

We now live in a 'post-Christian' America . The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis, we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.

Instead of a 'Western Christianity,' we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.