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.

Independent of the critique I'm making, I'm just trying to paint a more comprehensive portrait of American religion than you get from a right versus left, religious conservatives versus secular liberal, believer versus atheist, binary. Too often, we just look at religion in America through that kind of either/or lens. I think it's much more complicated than that.

I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well.

What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.

The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.

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.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.