'Our people are hungry for preachers who, like Magdalene, have seen the risen Lord. My darkest moments in homiletics are not when my theology is porous. My darkest moments are when I have ceased to pray - when the familiar phrases fall trippingly from my pen and tongue but it is all rote, prepackaged, with the life-giving juices dried up. My preaching is least effective when I experience nothing - neither God's presence nor his absence.'

Walter J. Burghardt, in John Burke, A New Look at Preaching, Veritas, 1983, p. 35 (cited in Expository Times, Feb. 1984, p. 131)