The arc of American history almost inevitably move...

We are losing sight of civility in government and politics. Debate and dialogue is taking a back seat to the politics of destruction and anger and control. Dogma has replaced thoughtful discussion between people of differing views.

I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.

I'm on the board of a national group called Faith in America. It's designed to fight religious-based bigotry.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.