The words in are leftovers of my quarrel with myself. They are the quiet confessions of one who has seen the thinness of "conventional wisdom orthodoxy" and a kind of religious optimism that can border on superstition. I have this long, unresolved quarrel inside of myself. It will no longer let me say some of the expected words I am supposed to say. In the face of the question with which I quarrel, "Why doesn't God do more?" I am left with the simple confessions that stumble about inside the walls of -timid attempts to say something livable, honest, and unadorned about the God who always does more than we can ever know, but who sometimes does less than we had always hoped. -From the Preface to the 2nd edition