It’s appalling that one person’s illness would be an opportunity for another to make money. The care of human beings should not be a commodity.

As we divide into affluent and poor enclaves, people’s sense that they share a common destiny withers, replaced by fear, misunderstanding, and class and racial antagonisms.

“You can’t have freedom of religion without free speech. You have to protect all of it: the Bible and the Quran and my right to say, ‘These books are full of fairy tales.’ ”

I was outside of time. Awe, glory, and gratitude are the only words for what I experienced.

These guys are allowed almost no dignity. As far as I’m concerned, their sentence is their punishment. They aren’t supposed to be treated cruelly on top of that.

Most black evangelicals didn’t vote for him. Most Latino evangelicals didn’t vote for him. But 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

Once the police come to the conclusion that someone committed the crime, they are trained to interrogate. At that point their goal isn’t to gather information; it’s to build a case against the person they’ve already decided is guilty. They want to get a confession.

As I said, maintenance treatment cuts the death rate for opioid addiction in half, which is better than any other method that’s been studied. If you went to a cancer center and weren’t even offered the treatment that reduced your risk of death the most, you would have grounds for a malpractice case. Yet most residential addiction-treatment centers do not offer maintenance treatment and, in fact, oppose it, saying it’s not “real” recovery.

I’m no expert on consciousness, but I’ve observed consciousness in other creatures my entire life. If we describe it as a state of being awake, being aware, then when you look at an animal, you see true wakefulness. Humans have created a sophisticated culture that serves as an insulating bubble, separating and protecting us from the environment, allowing us to relax such that we don’t have to be totally conscious. Most animals have to be at the helm of their ship all the time, or they die. They have multiple opportunities to die every day. Because humans don’t have that tension, our senses have become dull. Probably the only time that a human being experiences an animal level of awareness is in combat, where every second you might be in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle.

I’ll tell you what we don’t do: we don’t call the person’s doctor, or dial 911, or drive people to the emergency room. We ask what’s going on for them — not what’s “wrong” with them or if they have been given a diagnosis. If they do mention a diagnosis, we ask what it means to them. If they talk about voices, visions, suicidal thoughts, or injuring themselves, we meet this with calm curiosity. We’ve found that what helps people move through such feelings is being able to talk openly about them. Unfortunately many people don’t talk openly in clinical environments for fear that alarms will be sounded.