Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I grew up around a lot of Jews. I grew up culturally Jewish, ethnically Jewish, but without real belief and without a strong faith.

My father-in-law was a nuclear-submarine captain. My father was in the military.

What's positive is moving from a place of growing in faith to really feeling more grounded in faith, to understand that faith is hard, that I'll stumble, that I'll make mistakes, that I'll sin. But, that's part of being on a faith path; it's part of being a human being.

As a journalist, I've always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don't think it's essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.

I'm thankful for the ability to share my faith in a lot of different places. It's something that I take as a responsibility and an obligation to handle as best as I can.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

The story of Noah, like other stories in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, are archetypal. Noah's story tells us that human beings have an inherent tendency towards violence both towards their fellow human beings and towards the creation itself. The story tells us that this violence grieves God.

All creatures are united to God alone in an immediate union. They depend essentially and directly upon Him. Being all alike equally impotent, they cannot be in reciprocal dependence upon one another.