We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.

Mother Nature is not sweet.

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.

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.

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.