[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.

If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.

All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.