Mar/090
Faith
In college, I read Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard. It was an incredibly influential work for me, not only because of the reading and class discussions, but also because of the discussions I had about the story outside of class. I loaned it to friends and listened to how they responded to it. I discussed it with a Jewish friend of mine, who gave me powerful insights based on his understanding of what his faith teaches of that story.
After I finished reading Fear and Trembling I began to view faith not as adherence to a religious practice, but instead as a very real and very scary belief and action. You necessarily can't come to faith through logic alone. To have faith, one must have the "strength of the absurd." This was a departure from the cafeteria-Catholic understanding of faith that I grew up with.
This post was inspired by my reading of the Luke E. Hart series based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This particular section of the series (and I don't know if they will all be this way) took what I view to be a shallow look at faith. It's overly concerned with the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism (which isn't what I care about when I'm reading something titled "What Catholics Believe"). And it doesn't do enough to address the need to be authentically religious. That is, you need to take the initiative to take responsibility for your own relationship with God.
For me, that's what faith is.