Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

One of Wright’s principal rhetorical aims in the text is to make a point about the existence of God and the supernatural by appealing to fundamental human desires. He calls these specific aspects of human nature “echoes of a voice” and singles four of them out in particular: “the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty” (x). The reasonability and the attraction of Christianity is all the more apparent when it can be shown that fundamental Christian beliefs speak directly to these four aspects of the human person.

In the very first chapter Wright goes to the heart of this human longing for what is good and right: “We’re like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there’s something called justice, but we can’t quite get to it” (4). Continuing along these lines, the author lays out how the human person has certain innate longings—for truth, beauty, goodness—and shows how it is that Christianity provides answers (or paths towards answers) for all the most important questions that we can ask. As he notes, “[T]he reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a