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I'm fascinated by religion, but I'm not particularly religious.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

Religion, in any form, is always interesting to me because of how powerful it is. Not even the religion itself, but to the people that follow it... The effect that it has had on people's minds.

We've got to find ways of confronting the issues that divide - and at the heart of cultural issues, you often find religions.

On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous.

I'll be honest with you: politically, I have no issue with people, but my beef sometimes is with religion at the end of the day.

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.

I think that we are at a point in our country where we're trying to decide what role should religion play in the political arena.