However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to foster a greater sense of collective responsibility.

Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.

We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.

The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.

"Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.

...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.