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About 'Faith in Action'
Faith is more than beliefs. It is about right and wrong, justice and injustice -- about remaking the world.
"Faith in Action" tracks the activities of people of faith across the globe and across religious traditions. It maps their engagement around critical issues, from global health to the environment -- from AIDS to zebras.
It explores the struggles, alliances, and common efforts of people of faith, public and private, local and global. And it highlights how important it is for Americans to look beyond their borders and to appreciate the struggles of the "bottom billion" people in today's globalized world.
By Katherine Marshall |
November 20, 2007; 1:43 AM ET
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Posted by: Ibrahim Mahfouz | January 23, 2008 11:53 AM
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The problem of faith is found in the lack of faith. It is lack of faith by church going folks that creates the real dilemma of religion.
Ohg.
http://thefiresidepost.com/2007/11/26/philip-pullman-the-golden-compass/
Posted by: Ohg Rea Tone | November 26, 2007 10:21 AM
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Another arrogant "person-of-faith" who claims to "know" what's-what about "people-of-faith" - an "academic" nonetheless - who has not the first clue about the crucial semantic role of pistis / pisteou / pisteon in the making of 'episteme' or knowledge. Every "knower" is a "person-of-faith", whether buddhist, christian, confucian, hindu, humanist, jew, muslim, naturalist, secularist, shinto, taoist, . . . etc!
Ms Katherine Marshall needs to acquaint herself with the history of philosophy, starting w/ at least Socrates & Plato and their quest for an adequate conceptions of among other key notions, knowledge itself, and moving forward to Quine on webs-of-beliefs, which, at their inner-most regions are ultimately webs-of-faith seeking, to be vindicated pragmatically or not by inter-subjective 3rd-person experience.
I trust - "fides" - that the precincts of Georgetown are not yet a buffer against such sound scholarship!
Like her Georgetown colleague Jacques Berlinerblau - another pre-posterist who puts a propositional cart before the necessary conceptual horses, Ms Marshall's thinking is a nest of conceptual confusion, at best, and rhetorical disingenuousness, at worst. Let's assume - under the principle of charity - the former.
Her use - like that of the American populist evangeloids & theocrats - of the paternalistic term "people-of-faith" implies that the rest of any given population are "non-believers", showing
both conceptual and epistemic ignorance, maybe carelessness.
Like the earlier appropriation of the word 'gay' for the self-designation of a cultural sub-group, the appropriation of 'believer' & 'belief' & 'faith' by another - sometimes overlapping - subgroup sows conceptual confusion & serves only to accelerate the decay of American English.
Briefly: How may & should one designate a belief for which there is not or - in principle - cannot be empirical evidence?
Simply: Faith: Pistis! [Trusted Beliefs]
Hence: Everyone is a "person-of-faith" since everyone lives by mental states that can only be described as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen", including scientists in both their empirical & theoretical endeavors.
The cognitive state of faith, therefore, is constitutive of human nature. To think otherwise is itself a paradoxical mental state!
Posted by: Civic Humanist | November 25, 2007 8:27 PM
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KM. Your premise is wrong. More than wrong, you, being an academic, your premise is a lie. Worse than being a lie, your premise is is beyond immoral.
Faith is no more than a belief that cannot be proven as true or untrue.
Actions, on the other hand, are subject to proof.
Actions motivated by faith are as apt to be immoral (murder - genocide - racism - etc.) as not (surely you do not want me to go into that proof).
Love, let's learn and practice Love. Faith is a fabrication and failure.
The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!
Why, because Abou loved.
Posted by: Your neighborhood humanist | November 24, 2007 3:09 PM
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I am always suspicious of those who claim that "faith" arms them with superior knowledge of what is right or wrong. "Faith" is, by definition,a "belief" in something, as opposed to "knowledge" of a truth. History is full of well-meaning people of "faith", being so sure that they have the truth, that they resort to all sorts of force or methods to educate the "non-believers". I am reminded of a wise man who said: "Follow The Man Who Seeks The Truth, And
When He Claims That He Has Found It, Run Like Hell!"
Posted by: Ralph | November 22, 2007 8:48 PM
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Welcome to the Post. I imagine you're a (belated) response to the bitter atheist--I mean thoughtful Secularist--who appears here on a regular basis.
Should be interesting!
Posted by: John | November 21, 2007 9:57 PM
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Those in Saudi Arabia never seem to cease amazing me with how creative they can get when dealing with women issues. Their latest "invention" is constructing separate sidewalks for women.