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.
Francis SpuffordI can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.
Francis SpuffordThe 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.
Francis SpuffordWe are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
Francis Spufford