And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

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

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.