You Never Know When You Might Be

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.

Fiction That Does Not Acknowledge This At Least Tacitly Is Not True.

A Sermon Is A Form That Yields A Certain Kind Of Meaning In The Same Way That, Say, A Sonnet Is A Form That Deals With A Certain Kind Of Meaning That Has To Do With Putting Things In Relation To Each Other, Allowing For The Fact Of Complexity Reversal, Such Things. Sermons Are, At Their Best, Excursions Into Difficulty That Are Addressed To People Who Come There In Order To Hear That.

Over My Life As A Teacher, Women Have Been Too Quiet. I'm Quiet Myself. I Don't Think I Said Three Words The Whole Of Graduate School.

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.