What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.

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.

Tomorrow will never call to ask your opinion

Well, it just figures, " Younger told him, like a man explaining his religion.

Only the broken beyond repair could know my anguish.

I used to be afraid of the dark until I learned that I am light and the dark is afraid of me.

When I look back, if I'd played something differently, it might not have gone the way it did. So I don't feel like going back to my twenties and changing anything.

Conversations I have had with school principals and students lead me to the same conclusion-that...there is an evil and growing habit of profanity and the use of foul and filthy language.

What happened I think on Sept. 11 was we were given graphic and clear evidence that things had changed.

Break not an ancient friendship; keep it hale; Stir round its roots, that it be green of heart; Let not the spirit of its growth depart: It is a power to brave the strongest gale.

I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.

You don't have to be crazy to be a writer, but it certainly does help