Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense

Description

But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, 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 bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore. It's a book for believers who are fed up with being patronised, 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. Fresh, provoking and unhampered by niceness, this is the long-awaited riposte to the smug emissaries of New Atheism.

Francis Spufford's first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently, Red Plenty. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.

A unique book, cutting its way ruthlessly through thickets of both religious and anti-religious sentimentality; painfully funny at points, always impassioned and never glib. Rowan Williams, Master, Magdalene College, Cambridge University and former Archbishop of Canterbury Spufford has the great virtue of making the reader want to argue with him, while simultaneously yearning to hear more. Daily Telegraph Remarkable, passionate, challenging and tumultuously articulate book ... this is Spufford's most fascinating book. Our Choice, Sunday Times An interesting additional to the religious cannon ... a refreshing approach, which makes the book far more palatable than the nearly hysterical polemics we have come to expect from both sides. Spufford writes well, and his rationality shines through here. Sunday Business Post