The challenge, then, is to recognize that the world is about two things: differentiation and communion. The challenge is to seek a unity that celebrates diversity, to unite the particular with the universal, to recognize the need for roots while insisting that the point of roots is to put forth branches. What is intolerable is for differences to become idolatrous. No human being's identity is exhausted by his or her gender, race, ethnic origin, national loyalty, or sexual orientation. All human beings have more in common than they have in conflict, and it is precisely when what they have in conflict seems over-riding that what they have in common needs most to be affirmed. James Baldwin described us well: "Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other — male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other."
— William Sloane Coffin, The Heart Is A Little to the Left by Wiliam Sloane Coffin