Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.