Top Highlights

• The reason why it is good advice to “talk about people” in sermons is that the introduction of people produces ambiguity—as any storyteller knows.
• Undifferentiated ambiguity soon becomes no ambiguity at all. The key here is to provide clues as to the issue at stake and the difficulties of sorting out the ingredients—even the apparent unlikelihood of resolving the matter. But the lack of resolution at this point is precisely what interest is all about.
• All who preach know that a change of form is widely heard as a change of content.
• change of form is often heard as a change of content. Any book proposing a new form should expect to be greeted with the same suspicion.
• There is some plagiarism to be sure, but some ideas enter our minds as being so natural, so true, and so right that no ownership need be claimed or attributed. They seem to belong to everyone by virtue of being the way things are and, therefore, they are always available in the marketplace of thought.