I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.

I find hope in the darkest of days and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.

Most of us in the baby-boom generation were raised by full-time mothers. Even as recently as 14 years ago 6 out of 10 mothers with babies were staying at home. Today that is totally reversed. Does that mean we love our children less than our mothers loved us? No but it certainly causes a lot of guilt trips.

It began to dawn on me that perhaps my country needed me more at home than overseas.

Of course nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

In known history nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

To do what we are doing in this budget to our children cutting their health care funds decreasing opportunity simply so we can pay for tax cuts and a war in Iraq is beyond belief and we need to reverse it.

Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the 'Waterloo' Republicans dream of.