From Andrew (part one)

"Thanks for taking the time to read the whole book. You're not the first one to say it has the wrong title. Maybe I should have played off Sam Harris' book and called it "The Beginning of Faith." But when I tried to write about politics in these times, I simply found it impossible not to write about religion. Our foreign policy is shaped by a response to religious Islamic extremism; and our domestic politics, as you so ably demonstrate, has become about the use and abuse of religion for partisan poitical purposes.

I was struck in your book by many things that really are not about politics. Your account of your adolescence is honest, and very funny. Hormones are indeed a laugh riot, and I sometimes wonder whether God gave them to us to ensure that we remember to laugh at ourselves from time to time. But I was particularly struck by what you yourself describe as the moment of your epiphany: your brain tumor, your near-death experience when driving a car and blacking out. You may well have died if your wife had not seized the steering wheel."