The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.

Simon Schama Quotes