From the back cover:

For two millenia, artists, social and cultural activists, politicians and philosophers, humanists and devoted spiritual seekers have all looked to the sayings of Jesus for inspiration and instruction. While at work on another project, Wendell Berry began to note the actual teachings of Jesus about understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. And he began to wonder how a large segment of the Christian community could ignore the bold and the direct teachings offered by Christ and recorded by the authors of the Gospels. How could a community founded on compassion and forgiveness become enflamed by intolerance? He suggests if we ask the question, "What would Jesus do?" we would profit looking directly at what He said and did in the only record we have of his teaching.

This book collects the sayings of Jesus selected by Wendell Berry, who has contributed two essays of introduction and context. Here is a way of peace, a challenge offered by the greatest spiritual teacher in the West, a book of inspiration, of prayerful compassion, and we may hope a call to action at a time when our country and the world it once led stand at a dangerous crossroads.

Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery. 68 pages.

First sentences:

Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States. This might be a good thing, except that the observer, observing more closely, would have to conclude that, to the extent that Christianity is fashionable, it is loosely fashionable. It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.