Humanity evolves when we realise that animals have the same rights to the Earth as we do.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

When spirituality is the basis of your life, it gives you the strength, wisdom and courage to surmount the many storms of life that could destroy a weaker person who doesn't have this foundation.

In religion, there's a certain type of fear that if somebody believes differently from me, that it's a threat. Because I'm right, and there cannot be two ways that are right, so if I'm right, anything different than this must be wrong; and we attack those things and it's really due to insecurity, ego and fear.

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?

I was wondering if any of my faith was real at all, and I started to let go of a lot of things that I had learned and say, 'Maybe I just need to start over entirely with what I have learned about my faith.' And that's what I did.

I'm saying that an editorial process that is preparing the material for publication counts as part of the inspiring process whereby God, in his sovereignty, gave every word.

I grew up listening to spiritual music, Blind Willie Johnson and folk.