In the beginning, we’re told, was the word. Every once in a while someone shows up on the planet who is word-obsessed and word-gifted; and the light and darkness get named again. In our day, that someone is Buechner.
There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God’s counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator.
A boss who interrupts an employee a lot is called an extrovert, whereas an employee who interrupts a boss too often is called an ex-employee.
The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.
You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.
I don’t have a problem with delegation. I love to delegate. I am either lazy enough, or busy enough, or trusting enough, or congenial enough, that the notion leaving tasks in someone else’s lap doesn’t just sound wise to me, it sounds attractive.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.
Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.
The only cure from sin is by maintaining a vision of God.
Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.
True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.
Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.
Honest history is the weapon of freedom.
If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
History is, indeed, an argument without end.
The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.
In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.