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.
Francis SpuffordWe are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
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 SpuffordTaking 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.
Francis Spufford