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.

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

The powers of nature are so great, and our power is so inept. So,in order to cope with the incredible anxiety that human self-consciousness produced, I think we created God in our own image, and then portrayed this God as having supernatural power that we didn't have.

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.