I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.

There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?

A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.