“The age has no aversion to preaching as such. It may not listen to your preaching. If that proves to be the case, look for the fault first in your preaching, and not in the age.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 30
That Sort of Pother
“And at just that moment, there was a clatter and a rustle and pother of self-importance at the door of the office, and three women, of the protesting variety, came in.”
Ecochondriacs, p. 57
Warts and All
“That left him with nothing but guilt, and the unpleasant sensation of being the moral equivalent of a three-inch green tree frog”
Ecochondriacs, p. 48
Not Like a Hose
“Preaching is the bringing of truth through personality . . . it must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, pp. 26-27
Spiritual Salmon
“One time they had given him a little monologue, which he had delivered straight to camera, which argued that if you divided the name Adam into two words, a dam, you could see how easy it was for our humanity to become a blockage to the divine energy. If you wanted the energy to flow, you really needed to blow up that dam. It had occurred to Montenegro while he was delivering this particular message that this also had the added blessing of freeing up all the spiritual salmon, but he didn’t say anything about that”
Ecochondriacs, pp. 44-45
No Right to Amazement
“‘Divorce?’ He had no right to be amazed at the prospect of divorce appearing suddenly like this, but it is often the case that delusional people experience feelings that they have no right to experience”
Ecochondriacs, p. 42
Just Have to Keep at It
“How you learned how to type with those bratwurst fingers of yours beats me”
Ecochondriacs, p. 36
A Noble Goal
“That mission statement was, ’To fight the pagan death cult until we hang their last dog’”
Ecochondriacs, p. 34
Studying Hard
“He defined ecological sanity as a world that didn’t have any environmentalists in it anymore, except three at the South Pole perhaps, studying the weather. Not the climate, but the weather”
Ecochondriacs, p. 33
And That’s Good Writing
“The prose read like it had been written by the archangel Gabriel—when the muse was on him, when he was writing hot, and was going real good”
Ecochondriacs, p. 31