more by Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer explores a society with a weighty problem

I am one of those hateful people who can eat pretty much what he likes and never put on weight. Neither gym nor low fat foods appeal, and I have avoided both for many years. Yet, somehow, miraculously, I remain a svelte 11 stone.

I am, thus, singularly ill-qualified to write about obesity and its threat to our physical, emotional and financial health. Smug, self-satisfied and thin: you should take what I say with a (small) pinch of salt.

Nick Spencer looks up at the sky and reflects on what we can learn from Creation.

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ So wrote Immanuel Kant in the conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason.  

Kant may have been an ambiguous believer (to put it generously) himself, but his starry heavens have long been one of creation’s – thus Christians’ – greatest theistic arguments.  At their simplest (and least convincing) they supposedly demonstrate God’s existence.  At the more subtle (and more persuasive) they lift the human mind towards the possibility of the transcendent, the numinous, the ‘other’. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ Psalm 19 declares, ‘the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’

My wife was not getting on particularly well with people at work. This person just sort of stood out.  She was different. My wife started to chat to her. “You seem different from the rest. Why is that?”  she said. “Because I am a Christian and this is how we behave in the workplace,” and so on…  It didn’t take much to persuade my wife to want to find out more’.

This is how we are told it should work. An individual practises the presence of God in a distinctive but unobtrusive way at work.  The difference is noticed and asked about. He or she is open and unapologetic, without being pushy or appearing desperate.  The colleague is intrigued and motivated to respond.  Eventually, he or she makes a public profession of faith in Christ.

Do people come to faith this way, or is this just how the evangelism manuals say it should happen?

Nick Spencer talks to Julian Baggini

Could you tell us a little about your upbringing and how it helped to shape your mental landscape as an adult?

Well, I grew up a nominal Christian, I would say – I was like most people, more or less believing what they are told about God and Jesus and all that kind of thing. I went to a Catholic primary school. Looking back on it, I don’t like the way in which I was indoctrinated, but it was a very pleasant environment.