Is God on my side? And I think the question is, “Am I on God’s side?” And that’s the question I found more difficult to answer.

Moses is in the wilderness with 12 tribes. He’s got 12 tribes but he doesn’t have a nation. He’s got large tribes and he’s got small tribes. . . . The first thing he does when he sets up the camp in the desert, is he puts the largest tribes furthest away from each other so that they can't gang up on the smaller tribes, and so he creates buffer states in between the large tribes with two small tribes in between two large ones. And so he divides the goods and he keeps the strong from ganging up on the weak. And the metaphor for balance of power is right there.

[Saddam] is an evil person, is an evil environment, is an evil government. Bad things are happening to good people, somebody has to do something. And we find ourselves in that rather unique position, as the lone superpower. I think that’s the hand of God. That’s my sense. I think it is the hand of God on our nation called to do the right thing.

[W]e know that a lot of the preachers and the clergymen you know, they want to follow the scriptures and they want to read the scriptures which is fine and I respect them. I believe I am a Christian, I believe in reading the Bible, I believe in all that good stuff, yet people are still getting killed while we read the Bible, while we’re talking about it.

So sometimes, the scriptures say turn the other cheek. I’m a clergyman and I preach from the pulpit that you turn the other cheek. But you only got two cheeks and you can’t keep turning or you won’t be able to eat dinner. And so at some point you have to defend yourself.

Several people have alluded to the scriptures and to what God has done, and I just think that we just really have underestimated the power of God in this whole thing. I mean we keep saying we have to do this, we have to do this. Well, why don’t we let God do some things?

The only thing I have seen [from history], that I‘ve been involved with, a father who was in the Second World War, a husband who was in Vietnam. I’ve lived that side of the war issue. And the only thing that I’ve seen come from it is hate.

We are not particularly known for patience in this country. But we do need patience. You think of how the roots of our American democracy really started with the Magna Carta, don’t they? And the great traditions we had coming from England . . . We’re talking hundreds of years, centuries. So we need to have patience. I agree with all the things that have been said, to give [the Iraqis] time to grow into it and faith to do it.

[P]eople of faith [need] to ask the question, What would Jesus do about AIDS and Medicare and the elevation of women, and how would Jesus draft the national budget? And when we have four hundred billion going to the military, in my mind that doesn’t go with Jesus’ teaching of, Feed my sheep. If we had even 100 billion of that, 200 billion of that for sheep feeding, I imagine, I could envision a huge difference.

[A]s a Christian your confidence is not coming from the materials things around you. You really have the internal support that you have and therefore you do not need all the luxurious materials, wasteful things to make you distinguished. Because you really have the confidence that you’re distinguished as an aid of God and therefore you do not need a lot of those things that are just waste, that are just there for appearance but not for reality.

When I think about the experiences that I’ve had in life that I would call spiritual, a lot of them have been in nature, watching a sunset, or watching birds fly, or a lot of things that have happened out in the wilderness.

We keep talking about us and them, you know. We’re on this planet where we’re all human beings. They’re all our brothers and sisters, you know. So it’s selfish. To me it seems selfish of us to live like we’re living and let over 20% of the people in the world exist on less than a dollar a day.

When we choose to love our brother, wherever they reside on this planet, then we will find ways, and there will be ways made to us that we have no knowledge of now, because of that. So to me the divine economy is based on love.