God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

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.

Now, the fourth gospel says that the moment that Jesus is glorified is the moment he's put to death on the cross, not the resurrection. The moment he's put to death on the cross is when he shows forth glory, and the reason that is, is that he became free enough to give his life away and to love those who were taking it from him. And that's what God is all about. That's the mystical point of view that was hidden from me for years.

Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational.

I get letters every week from people who live in rural Texas or rural Mississippi and who feel totally alone. They feel like they must be the strangest person in the world. They don't fit in to the religious milieu of their communities. It doesn't make any sense to them. They read some of my columns and they know that there's somebody in the world at least as crazy as they are, and so they write and say is there anybody else?

You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'