With or without religion, with or without what ordinarily passes for theology, the name of God is too important to leave in the hands of the special interest groups.

The Weakness of God, p. 3-4

There is always something uncontainable and unconditional about an event, whereas names, like “God,” belong to conditioned and coded strings of signifiers.

The Weakness of God, p. 125

A name is a promissory note that it cannot itself keep.

The Weakness of God, p. 137

Names are endlessly translatable, whereas events are what names are trying to translate.

The Weakness of God, p. 144

The more sacred, the better, for their sacredness does not merely tolerate but demands deliteralization, and this is in virtue of the event they shelter.

The Weakness of God, p. 107

There are no guarantees about the course that events follow.

The Weakness of God, p. 176

The event is subject to all the contingencies of time and tide, of chance and circumstance, of history and power—in short, to all the forces of the world that conspire to prevent the event, to contain its disruption, to hold in check, its bottomless disseminative disturbance, to betray its promise.

The Weakness of God, p. 183

Rightly understood, the event overflows any entity; it does not rest easily within the confines of the name of an entity, but stirs restlessly, endlessly, like an invitation or a call, an invocation (“come”) or a provocation, a solicitation or a promise, a praise or benediction (like Elohim’s “good, very good”), whether or not the occurrences on the plane of being are promising or good, whether or not they are the match for what is stirring in the event of the call.

The Weakness of God, p. 187

[T]he truth is something one needs to have the heart for, the courage to cope with or expose oneself to, as when we speak of a hard truth or a harsh one, or when we speak of honestly facing the truth.

The Weakness of God, p. 197

The name of God, it should be insisted, is not a term of art, a technical or lifeless word coined by philosophers for their speculative purposes, but it is a word forged in the fires of life, in the joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

The Weakness of God, p. 218

For however much prestige and power a name may accumulate, an event is a more wispy and willowy thing, a whisper or a promise, a breath or a spirit, not a mundane force.

The Weakness of God, p. 224

Answering to the name of God is our business, not God’s.

The Weakness of God, p. 299

My idea is to stop thinking about God as a massive ontological power line that provides power to the world, instead thinking of something that short circuits such power and provides a provocation tot eh worlds that is otherwise than power.

The Weakness of God, p. 354

The weak force of a call is something we can (posse) or have the power to ignore—at our peril, perhaps but just so.

The Weakness of God, p. 361

The event that takes place under the name of the kingdom of God is an anarchic field of reversals and displacements. So rather than identifying the highest entity or nominating the supreme governor who everywhere brings order, my anarchic suggestion is to think of the name of God as the name of a disturbance or a holy disarray.

The Weakness of God, p. 376