Quotes from Jay Parini

The whole point of the Resurrection stories - and the Resurrection itself - is that we don't recognize Jesus when he comes back to us.

The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s.

By the time I went to college, I knew the major passages of the Bible pretty much by heart.

My earliest memories of holidays are from when I was about eight. We lived in Pennsylvania, and every year we'd visit Miami.

To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.

For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.

American politicians who dwell on American exceptionalism only dishonor us by suggesting we play dumb to our past.

Among the disciples of Jesus, it seems most likely that at least Philip was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.

A proper respect for nature means that you can't pollute the air, poison the rivers and chop down the forests indiscriminately without suffering greatly.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

I suspect that a huge amount of the anxiety and suffering that we see around can be closely traced to our wanton misuse of our resources. Just look at any garbage dump and see what is wasted. In a sense, we've wasted our souls.

Even among those who have no special allegiance to a particular branch of Christianity, there are plenty of seekers as well as agnostics and atheists who harbor a certain curiosity about Jesus and his story.

In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.

The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.

I suspect that the framers of the Bill of Rights have long since rolled over in their graves.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

It is not an easy thing to alter the trajectory of your life. People have expectations on your behalf. You come to believe them yourself.

In dreams begin possibilities.

Believe me, if you're a teenager, you're always in the damned woods. Literally, you're in the woods — probably too much you're in the woods. And metaphorically you're in the woods, in your life.

All writers would like to be overrated in their own lifetimes.

Poetry is a language adequate to one's experience.

and he realized that he missed the old days of sailing, the ship almost willowy and hesitant, responsive to winds and weathers - not this hard, unthinking, mechanical drive toward a goal or destinations, so typical of the age itself.