Unapologetic
Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
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- € 9,99
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'Passionate, challenging, tumultuously articulate . . . Fascinating.' John Carey, Sunday Times
'A wonderful, effortlessly brilliant book.' Evening Standard
'A rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through.' John Gray, Independent
If Christianity is anything, it's a refusal to see human behavior as ruled by the balance sheet. We're not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we're doing.
Unapologetic is a book for those curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century.
But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)?
It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unapologetic rhymes with splenetic, and that's one aspect of British writer Spufford's (Red Plenty) rhetorical tour de force, in which he not only takes on the new atheists but also the secularism of his own culture (6% of Britons regularly attend church, the author notes early on). Spufford stakes out ground for arguing the value of Christianity that is neither ontological, teleological, or any-ological. God, he asserts, is the ground of being, experienced emotionally, as one might experience Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. Having moved the boundaries of the argument, Spufford has at it, swearing, skewering, and bringing a sense of humor to bear on the question, "Why bother to be Christian?" A gifted writer, the author is closer to the American William James, who grasped the psychological payoff of religious belief, than he is to fellow Englishman and revered Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. The rhetorical pileup is wearing at times, as are so many contemporary arguments about religion. Spufford's style is as bracing as a cup of real English breakfast tea strong enough to satisfy believers.
