In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

We live in a very pluralistic society today. There are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Christians like me. There are a wide variety of religious expressions in this country. I think they all must be treated with respect and none of them must be given priority in the public arena.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

Nobody in the scientific or medical world thinks that homosexuality is something that people choose. It's something we are. Now, I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up when I was about twelve years old and girls didn't look obnoxious to me any longer, but I didn't make a choice about the matter. I just responded to my own hormones.

The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.

I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.

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.