If you're going to live in a community, you have to refrain from killing one another and stealing from one another. You must have honor and honesty in your dealings with one another. But I think the deeper thing that we need to do is to become so fully human that we don't grasp at life; we give life away. We give love away. We give being away. That is the ultimate work of religion.

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.

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 don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

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 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.

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.