I didn't choose to be white, I didn't choose to be male, I didn't choose to be heterosexual, I didn't choose to be right-handed. Those are the givens of life. And I don't know why the church can't deal with that, why they can't understand that. Well, I do know why: because people are always afraid of anybody who's different.

Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, says, "From the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles." This encompasses the whole world. Suddenly it's not the Jews against the Gentiles, or my tribe against your tribe.

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

I think Jesus is a fact of history. I think a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived and was crucified. I think his death interpreted his life in a fantastic way, because if you study that life carefully underneath an overlay of theology and mythology, you'll find that the power of that life was that he was constantly giving himself away. He was constantly calling people to be all that they could be.

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."