“I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.”

“... the modern era should not see an end to cultural diversity, but modern people should engage with their traditions in a transformed way: they should be recognized as 'traditions,' rather than as 'truths.”

“In the Episcopal Church I find a healthy sense of unity and diversity. In this tradition we recognize that that which holds the church together is more important than that which divides the church.”

“A “class analysis” does not necessarily begin and end with Marx’s nineteenth-century version, a version I regard as grossly inaccurate. The class struggle, moreover, does not begin and end at the point of production. It may emerge from the poverty of the unemployed and unemployables, many of whom have never done a day’s work in industry; it may emerge from a new sense of possibility that slowly pervades society—the tension between “what is” and “what could be”—which percolates through virtually all traditional classes; it may emerge from the cultural and physical decomposition of the traditional class structure on which the social stability of capitalism was based.”

“Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life. ”

“Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange.”