For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

We must all learn a good lesson - how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world... learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.

Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.

I won't forget the hood. I won't forget the days of catching a bullet on the way to the mailbox or bricks with death threats that somehow made their way through the window.

Christians who believe in the Bible believe that it is their job to bring others the joy of salvation. Even if they're murdered, beaten to death, imprisoned - that's what you do for God.

We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.

In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.