Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.

Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.