That’s what you get,’ he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, ‘when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give ’em either one or the other,...

Anyone who says he knows God’s intention is showing a lot of very human ego.

Author conveys contemporary respect for Methodist preachers who rode the circuit of frontier settlements to put themselves at risk for the Gospel near the Second Great Awakening. They were dubbed ‘God’s light artillery’.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord’s service. And in times like these, with...

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour...

Then faith’s paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through...

Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost. What we want is to win souls. They are not won by flowery speeches.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.”[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Extremism stifles true progression in all fields of human advancement; it is a detriment to everything but war, tribalism and the personal power of Nietzschean entities, striving only for the narcissistic vindication of their ego...

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.