Words matter. These are the best Francis Spufford Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
In a hundred years, Christianity will have mutated into something utterly unpredictable which, nevertheless, we’d recognize immediately. And same-sex marriage will be one of the fine old God-given traditions that conservatives leap to defend.
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.
For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing in will become conveniently true – but because the complicated truth about our hearts, as we struggle to perceive it, tells us what we are and where we are, and consequently what we need.
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological niches, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.
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.
Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I’m able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.
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.
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.
I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that – and I wasn’t argued back in, either.
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.
If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you’d think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.
Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.
