One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all
inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
Far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
One hears stories of doubtful Christians who when they seek counsel from their pastor or parents they are told to suppress their doubts
everyone’s a critic looking back up the river
every boat is leaking in this town
everybody is thinking they can all be delivered
sitting in a box like lost and found
but i found my place and it’s all right
we’re all searching for a better way
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I got my own way to believe
find a lighthouse in the dark stormy weather
we all could use a sedative right now
holy rollers sitting with their backs to the middle
all alone and sinking the bow
and if you want to have to pray
it’s all right
we all be thinking with our different brain
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I got my own way to believe
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
science says we’re making love like the lizards
try and say that fossils ain’t profound
silence says we’re not allowed to consider
silence says stand up sit down you’re out
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
science says we’re making love like the lizards
try and say that fossils ain’t profound
silence says we’re not allowed to consider
silence says stand up sit down you’re out
But I found my place
and it’s all right
I’m bearing witness to some better things
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I’ve got my own way to believe
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself being told to change your ways
there’s no way
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself being told to change your ways
for god’s sake
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, 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 grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. ~ Product Description
A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one.