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

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.

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

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.

When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.

There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal.