Jerry Falwell says, on Pat Robertson's program, that the reason we got attacked on 9/11 is that we were accommodating the ACLU and abortion and homosexuals and feminists in America, so God smacked us down.

Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy.

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

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

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