After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.

The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

People are not losing their religious needs, but they are going to three places to get their needs met. One is to conservative churches, which, for all their social benightedness, nevertheless do present their congregations with a different view of reality. Second, they are going to Asian religions. Third, they are going to the New Age, which when I'm feeling cynical I refer to as "New Age frivolity," because some of it is rather flaky.

I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form.