Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford, FRSLis an English author...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
inspirational funny funny-inspirational
You never came out the way you came in.
generosity want virtue
God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
real loss shopping
Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just be a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.
sides needs goodness
We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
book shapes inward
What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.
book tired half
When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.
religious ordinary way
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.
anybody asked certainly christians enters hold promise radical repetition subject
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.
however perceive state
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.
adaptable ecological incredibly intact love low parts preserving repertoire using
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.
actuality best embedded fabulous god hope lewis necessary render requiring special tried true
If you're a believer, God is not a thought-experiment requiring a special sub-creation to be tried out in. He's an actual, er, actuality already, embedded in a necessary and true story about guilt, hope, and liberty. I don't want C. S. Lewis doing his resourceful best to render Him as a fabulous special effect.
accentuate both changes continuity necessary religion stays sudden
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.
argued faith passive
I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.
sensation struck unfair
It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.