English - Author | 1964 -
I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.
Francis Spufford
LoveFaithHopeHeartThinkLose
What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.
ReligionPushTalkingWorthBack
Christianity is a religion of continuity and discontinuity as well. It's about what stays the same and what changes in the twinkling of an eye. Both are necessary truths, but sometimes it's important to accentuate the discontinuity, the sudden leap, the way you go up a tree, Zacchaeus, and come down a saint.
TreeReligionEyeYouDownGo
Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well - that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.
MomentComplacencyWorldRepetition
I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.
BestI AmMistakeChristianYouSay
Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe.
FoolUniverseYouFeelingEmotions
It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.
FaithPowerfulLookTrueMatter
Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will or should ever admit. We believers mean something different by the word: something that puts faith permanently in the category of irreproducible results.
FaithTruthScienceBestTruth Is
Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.
PastWalkingWealthFindLeaveWays
Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.
CareEndFindSomethingLooseAbout
I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.
WordsChildEdgePageKnowWant
It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.
MeWritingUnfairAlwaysLittle
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