Summary
Francis Spufford talks about emotion, faith, and being human.
Transcript
Emotion is important stuff. It may sound as if you’re offering a very flimsy defence of faith to say that it feels right. But actually, feeling is the basis on which we negotiate a huge amount of our lives, the right basis on which we negotiate our lives, because most things are not susceptible of proof or disproof. It’s not a world full of abstract propositions, it’s a world where you find your way with the most informed kind of feeling you can.
And when I say that Christianity has emotional resources or emotional authority or emotional appeal, it’s not because I’m consigning it to some fluffy, flimsy little corner which science can blow away with the giant vacuum cleaner of scepticism. It’s that it’s close in to the enduringly real and difficult matter of human lives. Emotions are what we go by a lot of the time, and Christianity’s embrace of the emotions is part of its embrace of humans as they actually are.
