I'd be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is - can be a great sustaining force.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.

hope is not a plan of action.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

I wanted to know how much of conversion was forced - that is, forced in the sense that the Inquisition forced people to choose - forced Jews, let's say, and Muslims to choose conversion to Christianity or death. I wanted to see how much of conversion historically was forced in that way and how much of it was really a kind of persuasion.

Once the Roman Catholic Church in the West became the church most closely connected with the state, the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the validity of any religion other than its own.