How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer but art is very self-referential whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents but grow out of the very essence of religion namely its absolute claims.

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

I say the law should be blind to race gender and sexual orientation just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind except for children the severely disabled and the elderly whose physical frailty demands society's care.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry I can do that.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves more and more peace and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Obama has been attacked repeatedly for not wearing a flag pin with Republicans claiming that his patriotism is in question. It's all a bit silly.