“What's the point of quoting the Bible to people who don't believe it's true" Dad would say.”

“People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them.”

“You don't choose anything important. It just happens. The only choice you have is if you'll make life's accidents work.”

“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.”

“...evangelicalism is not not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.”

“I'd be adrift in an ocean of uncertainty." Yes, and perhaps that's the only honest place to be. Another name for uncertainty is humility. No one ever blew up a mosque, church, or abortion clinic after yelling, "I could be wrong.”

“The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.”