«I really want people to be more thoughtfully alive in the way that they inhabit these traditions and in the way that they come to think about the way these traditions operate. Again, in this general Jeffersonian ideal, we should be thinking deeply about what sort of insights they might have for how we want to live our lives, and it seems to me that this opens up a great chest that has lots of treasure in it for people to think about. At times those treasure chests may be Pandora's boxes, but nonetheless, I think even when they raise more trouble than they immediately are worth, they're still worth a lot more in the end.»

«I teach about war, murder, capital punishment, sex and marriage, homosexuality, the environment -- who isn't interested about this stuff?»

«The point is not to give people the fantasy that there is a right Jewish, Christian or Muslim answer to any particular position. People may think that within the traditions or outside the traditions, but the point is to try to give them some sort of purchase on what you could call the basic grammar of moral deliberation in these three faiths.»