In the richest country in the history of the world this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4 0 but health insurance premiums are higher food prices are higher utility bills are higher and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

I am struck by the fact that personal faith and political agendas are intertwined more closely now than at any other time in recent history.

Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back and rightly as the preparation in history for their faith.

Through history people look for something spiritual. The greatest scientists in the world were men of religion and faith too.

Was the real Jesus of history one and the same as the Christ of faith whom we read about in the New Testament and worship in the church? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Is he really the divine Lord of lords?

Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.

I have written too much history to have faith in it and if anyone thinks I'm wrong I am inclined to agree with him.

Religious belief like history itself is a story that is always unfolding always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.

Skepticism has never founded empires established principals or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

May it not be that just as we have to have faith in Him God has to have faith in us and considering the history of the human race so far may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature the texts our first attempt at cosmology making sense of where we are in the universe our first attempt at health care believing in faith healing our first attempt at philosophy.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore we must be saved by faith.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration of feudalism and tribalism.

No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

When you go visiting countries you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture and then you have to leave. In my experience all countries have hidden treasures.

Literature overtakes history for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

At an incredibly divisive point in pop history Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure - after 'Bad Girls ' nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with 'Off The Wall.'

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel anything you read all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.