A Letter Makes Ordinary Things Seem Important.

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.

Oddly Enough, My Favorite Genre Is Not Fiction. I'm Attracted By Primary Sources That Are Relevant To Historical Questions Of Interest To Me, By Famous Old Books On Philosophy Or Theology That I Want To See With My Own Eyes, By Essays On Contemporary Science, By The Literatures Of Antiquity.

Anybody Who Has Read Any Biblical Scholarship Knows That Every Scholar Struggles Over Completely Intractable Problems With The Original Texts, Or What They Have To Work From. It's One Of The Great, Powerful, Mysterious Objects That Have Come Down Through History. This Does Not Translate Into Literal Interpretation For Me.

People Talk About How Wonderful The World Seems To Children, And That's True Enough. But Children Think They Will Grow Into It And Understand It, And I Know Very Well That I Will Not, And Would Not If I Had A Dozen Lives.

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.