The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.

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

I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.

Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

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.

The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.

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

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.

Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.

Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.

I try to read for pleasure whenever I can - it's a great way just to shut it off for a while so your brain doesn't get fried.

There are times you will be given intuition, you just know something, and you can't explain it. Don't override it. Don't talk yourself out of it. That's the Creator giving you inside information.

I am overly ambitious, because I realize it can be done.

If you could play, I'd play with you all night. But if I'm just playing by myself, it gets boring pretty quick.

I think that people will always want music; I think that the form that they will get it in, or distributed to them from, and the price they pay for it is what's up in question.

If you believe in free will, why don't you have confidence in people to use it? Why do you want a government, or whoever, regulating them, if you believe in it?

Traveling the world I've learned that progressives, regardless of their locations, think in a global space.