Andrea Engle

“ON THE EVENING OF THE DAY the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, a service was hastily improvised in one of the largest New York churches, where crowds of both believers and nonbelievers came together in search of whatever it is people search for at such times—some word of reassurance, some glimmer of hope.

"At times like these," the speaker said, "God is useless.

When I first heard of it, it struck me as appalling, and then it struck me as very brave, and finally it struck me as true.

When horrors happen we can't use God to make them unhappen any more than we can use a flood of light to put out a fire or Psalm 23 to find our way home in the dark.

All we can do is to draw close to God and to each other as best we can, the way those stunned New Yorkers did, and to hope that, although God may well be useless when all hell breaks loose, there is nothing that happens, not even hell, where God is not present with us and for us.”
― Buechner,, Frederick

“It’s hard to head home without succumbing to nostalgia, standing where so many versions of yourself once stood,”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return—more every thing presses on—”
― John B. Boles, Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty

“The primary experience that Garrison, Mill, and Mazzini had in common was that of being antislavery in an age of slavery. But they also defended democracy in an age of aristocracy, monarchy, and doubt about democracy’s future.”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform