My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into the kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

The earth has always supported me in all my endeavors. I trust it.

If you truly want to grow as a person and learn, you should realize that the universe has enrolled you in the graduate program of life, called loss.

My first major role was in a play called Through the Leaves.

I have gone through the process of re-evaluating, giving a personal re-evaluation to everything that I ever believed and that I did believe while I was a, a member and a minister.

My brain cannot conceive how old my body is.

Belief creates biology.

Why do they sterilize needles for lethal injections?

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.