The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

The decline of institutional Christianity over the last 40 or 50 years has empowered a side of American religion that has always been there. The sort of do-it-yourself, "create your own Jesus" kind of faith. But, the forms that faith takes do have a real reason they are so appealing.

Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.

You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.