Faith?

     “… faith must be emancipated from its too-easy equation with belief and religion and reconnected with … matters of truth, reality, & ultimate importance. … personal, affective, visceral, and passional dimensions of being and knowing.

     If faith ( meaning-making in its broadest sense ) is discounted, the human landscape becomes arid, and hope and commitment wither; the human spirit grows parched, and not much more than a prickly cynicism can be sustained.

      if faith is understood as static, fixed, & inextricably bound to a particular language or world-view, it must be discarded as obsolete, if the integrity of intellect and soul is to be maintained in a dynamic world.

      Cynicism functions as a kind of armor against disappointment and despair. Skepticism combines the power to question with an openness to being convinced. Skepticism can be a healthy form of doubt, or it may reflect the loss of a once-shared trust in a universe of meaning, however that was defined. It may also function as a thin veneer of public sophistication, glossing over a private, lonely void that neither the rational mind nor economic success can fill. 
     In our time, we have become at once scientifically informed, philosophically relativistic, and disappointed & disillusioned in many quarters. Yet ironically (meaning) can come alive in an engagement with radical uncertainty.” 

         Parks SD. Big questions, worthy dreams. Mentoring young adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith. John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, 2000. 

     See: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/11/out-of-fearful-pessimism-we-isolate.html

Photo: cia  www.dpreview.ca