If you have issues with family friends and people at work try and solve these issues head on so you can move on and concentrate on having the life you want.

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed and debated intensely.

I have a Christian worldview and so it shapes the way that I view issues. I don't apologize for that and I don't think people of faith ought to shrink away from being in the public arena.

I think the issue of clergy sexual abuse sparked people to look at their faith in a different way.

At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another.

At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society which we call Western civilization could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good including life to defend it.

I haven't chosen to make an issue of faith.

Seven and half years ago I began my own journey. For me and my family it was a time of adversity. But during that adversity I derived a deeper faith. And born out of that adversity was a commitment to devote myself to those people and to those issues that truly matter to me.

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

It's possible that the 2012 general-election race will be the least overtly religious one since 1972 the last campaign before Roe v. Wade and the rise of Jimmy Carter brought evangelicalism into the political mainstream. That's because faith remains a complicated issue for Obama who is still wrongly thought to be a Muslim in some quarters.