Growing up in Michigan, I can't think of anything so explicitly communicated to me in my whole education experience as the vileness of in-your-face racism.

As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won't be afraid to say so.

Just very practically, pastors need to be careful that while they have a right to call people to absolute allegiance to the Word of God, we don't have the right to call people to absolute allegiance to our programs or every ministry we have at the church.

Many of us think in terms in parental determinism: 'If I push all the right buttons my kids are going to turn out OK.' I want to instill in myself and my people a wonderful dose, not of carelessness, but of God's sovereignty. He knows the hairs on your kids' heads.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

When Jews left Judaism, they didn't stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.

In my own one-woman show, 'Feeling Good,' I talk about my childhood and write a letter to my younger self in the show. The most important thing I would tell her is to trust my instincts. Just trust them. They're little whispers from God, I think. You've heard it a million times, but it's true: Listen to that inner voice.