Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a recovering atheist: a Christian convert who has more sympathy with some of my former atheist brethren than with a lot of my fellow believers. And I’m a historian by trade, which means I believe in the importance of trying to get inside the heads of people living in very different times – but who were still people. I’ve chosen polemical books by atheists and by believers, but in my own writing I try to get sympathetically inside the heads of both. I find that I get on better if I listen to the other side rather than banging the drum for my own – whichever ‘my own side’ is.
Alec's book list on atheism and religion
Why did Alec love this book?
The anti-John Gray – and, in purely literary terms, the best writer on my list, which is saying something. It’s not, Francis Spufford says, an apologetic, a reasoned defence of faith. It’s a personal account of why his Christianity makes emotional sense to him, and why it might make emotional sense to other people too. Worth reading for his retelling of the life of Jesus alone. He doesn’t deal with the intellectual questions of religion vs. atheism (though he has some sly hints). What he does is explain why you might want to deal with those questions. So it’s an ‘unapologetic’: both, because it’s about emotion and not narrow reason, and also, he says, because he’s not sorry. Read it, and you won’t be either.
2 authors picked Unapologetic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"Unapologetic" is a brief, witty, personal, sharp-tongued defence of Christian belief, taking on Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great". 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…
- Coming soon!