What is it like to be a Christian? Not what do Christians believe or how many superstitions do they quietly excuse before breakfast? But what is faith as experienced?
It is an important question because, as Rowan Williams notes in his new book, The Lion’s World, people might think they know what faith is about when, today, they perhaps don’t, never having been there. Subtitled “A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia”, the book is partly about CS Lewis. But it is also a chance for the archbishop of Canterbury to convey what Christianity means to him. This is difficult to do, not only because contemporary Britons lack Christian experience but because, as titular head of the established Church of England, Williams recognises a need to “rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity ”“ which is almost everything”.
The elusory character of Christianity is also on the mind of Francis Spufford, the historian and science writer. The subtitle for his new book, Unapologetic, is “Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense”. A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that “it fits the human heart”. Rather, it is that so many of the secular alternatives to Christianity only work because they “depend on some tacky fantasy about ourselves”.
Read it all.
(Guardian) Mark Vernon–Rowan Williams and Francis Spufford on being a Christian
What is it like to be a Christian? Not what do Christians believe or how many superstitions do they quietly excuse before breakfast? But what is faith as experienced?
It is an important question because, as Rowan Williams notes in his new book, The Lion’s World, people might think they know what faith is about when, today, they perhaps don’t, never having been there. Subtitled “A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia”, the book is partly about CS Lewis. But it is also a chance for the archbishop of Canterbury to convey what Christianity means to him. This is difficult to do, not only because contemporary Britons lack Christian experience but because, as titular head of the established Church of England, Williams recognises a need to “rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity ”“ which is almost everything”.
The elusory character of Christianity is also on the mind of Francis Spufford, the historian and science writer. The subtitle for his new book, Unapologetic, is “Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense”. A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that “it fits the human heart”. Rather, it is that so many of the secular alternatives to Christianity only work because they “depend on some tacky fantasy about ourselves”.
Read it all.