At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble

Our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone.

Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we're meant to be doing.

Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.

We live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right. And having made that decision, we then need to inhabit the story we trust.

The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement... has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century... It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today... But then came the First World War... What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history.