I’ve been meaning to write about Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic for some time.  I read the book at the end of last year and loved it.  It takes an interesting approach to the Christian faith, focusing on the emotional side of things.  In many ways, the eleventh grade class that I teach is an apologetics class that takes a more logical approach to things (because Christians aren’t just feelers; they are also thinkers).  I remind my students that logic is a tool, that it can only take you so far.  In an interview posted on Christianity Today‘s website last week, Spufford takes the other side of that:

I don’t really believe that the truth of Christianity can be demonstrated in public by logical tools. What can be done is for false claims about the improbability of Christianity to be pushed to one side, so that we have, once again, a clear space in which the conversation can happen . . . That is the contemporary European situation, where justification and defense are the wrong tools. What you need is a quiet, imaginative introduction of those things in the first place. You need to appeal to people’s existing knowledge about their lives. You need to say, “This stuff, far from being the far-off stereotype of which you have only distantly heard, is actually a recognizable way of talking about the heart you already possess.”

I kind of relate to Spufford’s European perspective on things.  In many subtle ways, I work in my own “post-Christian” environment.  He has a lot to say about things, and he says them all well  I highly encourage you to read the rest of the interview, which you can find here.