We have lost somewhat the deep religious grounding of the social gospel tradition in the Christian community, of the prophetic tradition in the Jewish community, that our engagement in responding to the call of our texts and our God and our religions for us to be God’s partners in creating a better world is a deeply and profoundly religious task. And working to recapture that is I think the central challenge.... And any religion that does not speak to the great moral issues of the lives of its people, particularly its young, or the great moral issues of their world will fail to capture their imagination, their loyalty, their engagement, and we back off of that prophetic thrust for justice and peace that was so central to the Abrahamic traditions at our peril.

To me the Buddhist precepts, they boil down to not living your life at the expense of other beings, ...and this is very difficult to sustain in America. Good people - anyone can be a good person, but do you want to live at the expense of the person in Bangladesh or Pakistan who’s making your shirt or the oil rig worker in Nigeria, the agricultural worker in the Central Valley who is being hounded by the INS? Do you want to live that way? Until we address those questions, I don’t think we’ll have a truly progressive religious movement or truly progressive movement.

In my mind, I’m part of the story of America, I’m part of the story of India, and I’m part of the story of Islam. It was in the Holy Qur’an, which is the book that animated my ancestors, that I found the fullest description of that and that I found language that I considered home…. I love America because it gives me, the child of immigrant Muslim parents from India, the chance to participate in its progress and to carve a place in its promise. And I believe that this country was founded in large part on the idea of religious freedom and its relationship with religious pluralism…. We have managed to have a relatively thick religious pluralism in this country that has respect for identity, that nurtures community, that focuses people on the common good. What I think we need to do in America is realize that this in the early twenty-first century, in the century of the faith line, is in fact, our most precious internal resource and our most important gift to the rest of the world.