The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.