Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.