Quotes from Andrew Davison

Take the Gospel parables: what are these stories, these narratives, if not powerful invitations to people to locate themselves within the situations of others, precisely in order to realize the moral landscapes of their life, so that they may develop their spiritual, empathetic and imaginative view of reality?

If God is given to be misunderstood then he is also given to be re-understood.

Reason cannot operate without imagination.

Virtue, whatever else it means, at least means being more human; it would not be virtuous if it did not. Sin, whatever else it means, means being less human, more still, cold, proud, selfish, mean, cruel, and all the rest of it.

The famous injunction, normally attributed to Saint Francis, to 'preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary', like many timeworn phrases, contains much that is true.

As an apologetic strategy, it only makes sense to meet people where they are. Where else, indeed, can they be met?

The Church knows fully that its message is in harmony with the most secret desires of the human heart, when it champions the dignity of the human vocation, restoring hope to those who now despair of anything higher than their present lot. Its message, far from belittling man, secures the light, life and freedom of his development. Nothing other than this can satisfy the human heart: 'You have made us for yourself,' Lord, 'and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Christian ethics makes sense of human life from a moral perspective, presenting us with a vision of what it means to be a flourishing human person. Christian ethics suggests a path to a full-blooded and worthwhile life. It doing so, it simultaneously redefines, in countercultural ways, what such a 'successful' human life would look like.

he believed that all language, except for the most basic and elementary, was metaphorical, and even the highly desiccated metaphors are not verbal algebra.

The Church is a living body; continuously active, continuously performing Christ in the myriad contexts within which it operates. It comprises those conformed to Christ in the past, being conformed to Christ in the present and who will be conformed to Christ in the future.

among the most important things to consider when it comes to gaining the skills of Christian living are things like discipline, physical actions, training and practice.

This might suggest that any successful exercise of apologetics, like indeed that of Lewis, must contain a strong confessional element which convinces precisely because it persuades through the force of an imaginative presentation of belief.

Adam of St Victor (1112–46): 'Effective cause and also formal cause, | and final cause – God – | but at no time is he the material cause.

There is much more to apologetics than affirming the capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of things. Apologetics, we must recall, engages the mind, emotions and imagination. It appeals to beauty and morality, as much as to rationality.

Doctrines, though useful, are the product of analytical dissection; they recast the original, equivocal, historical material into abstract, less fully realized categories of meaning. In short, doctrines are not as richly meaningful as that which they are doctrines about.

Christianity does not displace scientific accounts of the world; rather, it lends them ontological depth and clarity, and in doing so, discloses a greater vision of reality – a vision that gives both intellectual resilience and existential motivation to the task of apologetics.

although apologetics is 'a reasoned defence', its basis is necessarily imaginative, for reason cannot work without imagination.

We are given no escape from ultimate questions. In one way or another they are in us, whether we like it or not. Scientific truth is exact, but it is incomplete.

Reading is a practice; good reading is a highly sophisticated practice. The practice has to be learnt.