I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.

Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.