On Faith

In the first substantive post on this "new" blog I promised to come back to faith, or rather a discussion of what is meant by the term "faith" as opposed to "belief." I believe such a distinction is important to understanding much of what is going on around us today. Indeed, I have faith in the importance of this distinction.

If you were to visit my previous and short-lived blog, The Critical Path (http://www.thecriticalpath.blogspot.com), you would quickly learn of my affinity for Northrop Frye. I discovered Frye during my graduate work at the University of Dayton thanks to my Rhetoric professor, Dr. Wade Kenny (check out his bio page here: www.msvu.ca/publicrelations/faculty_profiles.asp#Robert_Wade_Kenny). I find it somewhat difficult to say something like, "Frye was an English professor," though such a statement would be true. I would feel better saying that he is one of the most important theorists of literary criticism, discourse and symbolism of the last century. He spent a fair bit of his career on the literary criticism of the Bible, was drawn to the imaginative capacity of the human spirit and created systemic tools for the analysis of discourse and literary structure that have the power to change your very life.

I encourage you to explore Northrop Frye yourself. You can start here: http://vicu.utoronto.ca/fryecentre/ Of course, I would recommend reading some of Frye’s works, but where to start? Let’s leave that question for another post and get on with the matter at hand, which takes us to a little essay by Frye entitled, "The Dialectic of Belief and Vision" (Myth and Metaphor: Selected essays 1974-1988, pp. 93-107. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

In this essay, Frye spends some time talking about the difference between belief and faith. Frye writes, "Belief to me refers to a state of mind, faith to its expression in action" (author’s emphasis retained). This is very close to my own understanding of the concepts. I can say that I believe it will rain tomorrow, but I express my faith in the forecast by walking out the door with an umbrella in hand.

So what? Why am I taking the time to draw this distinction, which might seem obvious to you? Let’s try a different illustration to get closer to the real issue at hand. I can say I believe in equal opportunity, but do I have faith if I fail to challenge the racist statement made by my boss over lunch? I might believe the death penalty has a place in democratic society, but my faith is in question unless I am willing to pull the switch and electrocute the guilty prisoner.

We live in a world of belief, and faith increasingly becomes a relic of generations past. We are so far removed from the killing of our food, the extraction of our resources from the earth and the protection of our democracy from the threats of terrorists abroad or neo-conservatives at home that we cannot honestly be considered faithful members of our society. Believers one and all we are. Faithful we are not. Put that in your religious flux capacitor and see where you end up.

Stephen Stills told us that we find the cost of freedom buried in the ground. Who will pay today?

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