Listening is an act
of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening.
Fiction offers the best means of understanding
people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be
lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's
comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand
what happened decades later, if ever.
No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered
in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
