True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

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.

I think our people in Britain have a normative expectation of ethical conduct.