The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.

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.

I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.

You need to have a WhyHaving a “Why” whatever it is, becomes food. It makes your dreams become more urgent.

I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I'm no exception.

It's your thinking that decides whether you're going to succeed or fail.

I wish I could relate to the people I'm related to.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

Another of these strong silent men. The world is full of us.