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

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.

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.

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.

History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]

Technology has not only changed the way people are able to view movies, it has changed the way our industry produces and advertises movies.

God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.

A friend of mine told me, you know your obsession with girls who talk like sexy babies? You have to put that into your script.

I am pleased to be praised by a man so praised as you, father. [Words used by Hector.] [Lat., Laetus sum Laudari me abs te, pater, laudato viro.]

I don't want to have a good fight, I don't want to have an exciting fight, I want to have a finish.

I sincerely believe that there's room for cutting down trees for forestry and grazing, so as we all get to eat. Everyone has to compromise.

Without ducking responsibility, what's wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.