The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.

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.

Nobody in the scientific or medical world thinks that homosexuality is something that people choose. It's something we are. Now, I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up when I was about twelve years old and girls didn't look obnoxious to me any longer, but I didn't make a choice about the matter. I just responded to my own hormones.

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth.

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.