I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth.

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

I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.

If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system.

The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.