To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it.

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

There's one other interesting thing about Western democracy. It didn't arrive at the end point that Karl Marx thought it would that wealth would become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, that eventually the few would be killed by the many who were deprived, and that a different kind of government would then develop. What happened in Western democracy is that we began to understand that a democratic system can't work if half of the people are starving and the other half are dieting.

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being.

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.

I prepare for death by living.