Francis Spufford

I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.

If you're a believer, God is not a thought-experiment requiring a special sub-creation to be tried out in. He's an actual, er, actuality already, embedded in a necessary and true story about guilt, hope, and liberty. I don't want C. S. Lewis doing his resourceful best to render Him as a fabulous special effect.

Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well - that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.

Socialism has no moral justification whatsoever; poor people are not morally superior to rich people, nor are they owed anything by rich people simply because of their lack of success. Charity is not a socialist concept - it is a religious one, an acknowledgment of God's sovereignty over property, a sovereignty the Left utterly rejects.