Sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith. For me, it was reading about how the Catholic Church wrestled with itself in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII set Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions - in motion. It changed the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends. If you can do that, after the longest history of hatred the world has known, that empowers you as a Jew or a Muslim to wrestle with your faith.

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

Giving is what makes a nation great.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.

We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.

A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.