It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name....That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The Gospel is always answer and light for everyday human problems, and one of them consists precisely in the excessive disparity between poor and rich who come across each other in very concrete situations in life and society. We Christians cannot be neutral spectators of the needs and of the poverty of others.

The division between those who accept, and those who deny, Christian revelation I take to be the most profound division between human beings.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

The Gospel is, first of all, confirmed by the witness of life, the testimony of those who let themselves daily convert by the Lord. More than technics, it is the announcement of the infinite love of God’s mercy by concrete people. It is God, present in the person who announces and in the heart of the one who listens to the announcement, and that is where the Gospel draws its effectiveness.

There should be as much difference between the worldling and the Christian, as between hell and heaven, between destruction and eternal life.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...

The benevolence of the Gospel lies in actions