I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor's." Your neighbor is clearly a male, and the woman, the ox and the ass are property of the male. That's not morality I will salute today.

We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.

Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.

They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.

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