faith and spirituality essay

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Faith, religion, and spirituality: a phenomenological and hermeneutic contribution to parsing the distinctions.

1. Introduction: Questions of Definition

2. phenomenological distinctions of levels of experience and analysis, 3. hermeneutics of the particular experience of faith, 3.1. faith as first-order discourse, 3.2. faith in the biblical texts, 3.3. faith as personal adhesion, 4. hermeneutics of the symbolic and ritual expressions of religions, 4.1. religious symbols and myths, 4.2. religion as manifestation, 4.3. religions as languages, 5. hermeneutics of the spiritual structures of human personhood, 5.1. spirituality as work on the self, 5.2. spirituality as transformation of the self, 5.3. spirituality as essential structure of the human, 6. conclusion: faith, religion, spirituality, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Gschwandtner, C.M. Faith, Religion, and Spirituality: A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Contribution to Parsing the Distinctions. Religions 2021 , 12 , 476. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070476

Gschwandtner CM. Faith, Religion, and Spirituality: A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Contribution to Parsing the Distinctions. Religions . 2021; 12(7):476. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070476

Gschwandtner, Christina M. 2021. "Faith, Religion, and Spirituality: A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Contribution to Parsing the Distinctions" Religions 12, no. 7: 476. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070476

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Spiritual Journey Essays Examples: Faith!

Spiritual journey essays are reflective pieces that delve into an individual’s personal exploration of their own beliefs, faith, or spiritual experiences .

These essays often discuss challenges faced, lessons learned, and the personal growth that comes from such journeys.

A spiritual journey essay is a personal narrative that explores the writer’s journey towards a deeper understanding of their spiritual beliefs.

This might mean recounting personal experiences that led to a strengthening of faith, exploring the impact of certain religious practices, or reflecting on how a spiritual journey has influenced personal growth.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaway

5 interpretations: spiritual journey essays examples.

Personal Experiences That Shape Individual Spiritual Journeys

Exploring the intricacies of individual spiritual journeys through personal experiences is a compelling topic in spiritual journey essays.

These essays provide real-life examples that shape and influence one’s unique path to spiritual enlightenment.

Effect Of Life Events On Spiritual Growth:

Personal experiences play a vital role in shaping an individual’s spiritual journey. These life events can significantly impact one’s beliefs, values, and overall spiritual growth.

Life events can be both positive and negative, such as a profound loss, a life-altering epiphany, or a joyful celebration. Each experience brings unique lessons and insights that contribute to the development of spirituality.

Positive life events, like finding true love or achieving personal goals, often evoke feelings of gratitude, contentment, and a deeper connection to a higher power.

These events can fuel spiritual growth by strengthening faith and providing a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

On the other hand, challenging life events like illness, betrayal, or failure can lead to profound introspection and self-reflection.

These difficult moments often prompt individuals to question their beliefs, seek spiritual guidance, and explore new paths of understanding.

Adversities faced during life can act as catalysts for spiritual exploration, allowing individuals to cultivate resilience, compassion, and empathy. They can break down preconceived notions, opening the door to new perspectives and spiritual growth.

Challenges Faced During Spiritual Exploration:

Embarking on a spiritual journey is not always smooth sailing. It comes with its own set of challenges and obstacles that individuals must overcome to deepen their understanding of themselves and their spirituality.

One of the primary challenges is the resistance to change. The comfort of familiar beliefs and religious doctrines can hinder individuals from exploring new philosophies or spiritual practices.

Overcoming this resistance requires openness, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge preconceived notions.

Another challenge is the fear of uncertainty. Exploring the unknown and questioning long-held beliefs can be unsettling.

It requires individuals to confront their fears, embrace ambiguity, and trust in the process of self-discovery.

Societal and cultural pressures can pose obstacles to spiritual exploration. Conforming to societal norms and expectations may discourage individuals from following their own unique spiritual paths.

Breaking free from these external influences can be challenging, but it allows individuals to authentically connect with their own beliefs and values.

Lastly, the quest for spiritual understanding often involves periods of doubt and confusion. The journey may involve encountering conflicting teachings or questioning the existence of a higher power.

These moments of uncertainty can be unsettling but can also lead to deeper insights and a more profound sense of spirituality when embraced with an open and curious mind.

Role Of Introspection In Understanding One’s Spiritual Path:

Introspection plays a crucial role in unraveling the complexities of one’s spiritual journey. It involves examining one’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences to gain deeper self-awareness and understanding.

Through introspection, individuals can reflect on their values, beliefs, and behaviors, allowing them to align their spiritual path with their true selves.

It encourages individuals to question their motives, desires, and intentions, ensuring authenticity and sincerity in their spiritual exploration.

Introspection also facilitates the identification and examination of personal biases and conditioning that may limit spiritual growth.

By examining these subconscious influences, individuals can break free from societal expectations and embrace their own unique spiritual paths.

It allows individuals to uncover patterns and connections between their actions and their impact on their spiritual journey.

Remember, life events can shape our spiritual growth, but it is the challenges faced and the role of introspection that allows us to understand our spiritual path on a deeper level. Let us explore and embrace these aspects to embark on a transformative spiritual journey.

Essay Writing Aids In Self-Reflection And Growth

Essay writing serves as a valuable tool for self-reflection and personal growth on a spiritual journey.

Through thoughtful introspection and expression of our experiences, beliefs, and emotions, we gain deeper insights, expand our understanding, and evolve in profound ways.

Expressing Emotions And Insights Through Essays:

• Writing essays allows individuals to express their thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences, leading to self-reflection and growth.
• Essay writing provides a creative outlet for individuals to articulate their spiritual journey, giving voice to the complexities and nuances of their inner experiences.
• Through the power of words, essays enable individuals to convey their deepest emotions, allowing for a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s spiritual path.
• Essays serve as a platform to explore and share personal insights, helping to foster self-awareness and personal growth.

Developing Clarity And Perspective On Spiritual Experiences:

• Writing essays about spiritual experiences helps to bring clarity and understanding to complex thoughts and emotions that may arise during one’s spiritual journey.
• By putting experiences into words, individuals gain a clearer perspective on their spiritual path, allowing them to uncover deeper meanings and insights.
• Through the process of writing, individuals may discover new connections and patterns in their experiences, leading to a greater understanding of their own spirituality.
• Writing essays provides an opportunity to reflect on spiritual practices, beliefs, and encounters, facilitating personal growth and development.

Finding Support And Connection Through Sharing Personal Stories:

• Sharing personal stories through essays creates a sense of connection and support within the spiritual community, as others may resonate with similar experiences or find inspiration in one’s journey.
• Writing and sharing essays fosters a sense of belonging, as individuals realize they are not alone in their spiritual quest and can draw strength from the shared experiences of others.
• Personal stories shared through essays can provide comfort, guidance, and encouragement to those who may be facing similar challenges or seeking validation on their own spiritual path.
• The act of sharing personal stories through essays allows for a collective sense of empathy and understanding, creating a supportive network of individuals on a shared spiritual journey.

Remember , essay writing serves as a transformative tool for self-reflection, clarity, and connection on one’s spiritual journey.

By expressing emotions and insights, developing perspective, and sharing personal stories, individuals can navigate their spiritual path with greater understanding and growth.

Insights From Real-Life Spiritual Journey Essays

Discover profound insights and real-life examples through spiritual journey essays, exploring the depths of personal transformation and enlightenment.

These soul-stirring narratives offer a unique perspective on the transformative power of spiritual exploration.

Essay Example 1: Overcoming Adversity And Finding Inner Peace

In this essay example, the author delves into their personal journey of overcoming adversity and finding inner peace.

The essay reflects on the challenges faced and the lessons learned along the way. Through their experiences, the author highlights the transformative power of resilience, self-reflection, and spirituality.

Here are the key insights from this spiritual journey essay:

• Coping with loss: The essay explores how the author dealt with the loss of a loved one, sharing their emotional journey and the strategies they employed to navigate through grief.
• Embracing spirituality: The author discusses how they turned to spirituality as a source of solace during challenging times, emphasizing the importance of faith and belief in finding inner peace.
• Practicing gratitude: The essay elucidates the role of gratitude in the author’s spiritual journey, highlighting how focusing on the positive aspects of life helped them cultivate a sense of serenity and contentment.
• Forgiveness and letting go: The author reflects on their process of forgiving others and themselves, realizing that holding onto resentment and past grievances only hindered their spiritual growth.
• Finding purpose: Through their journey, the author discovered the significance of aligning their actions with their values and passions. They discuss how this sense of purpose contributed to their overall well-being and spiritual fulfillment.

Essay Example 2: Rediscovering Faith Through Nature And Solitude

This essay example revolves around the author’s experience of rediscovering their faith through connecting with nature and embracing solitude. It sheds light on the profound impact of natural surroundings and the solitude it offers.

The following insights emerge from this spiritual journey essay:

• Seeking solace in nature: The essay recounts the author’s encounters with nature, emphasizing the sense of peace and spiritual connectedness they felt while immersing themselves in the beauty of the natural world.
• Embracing solitude: The author discusses how solitude allowed them to reconnect with their inner self, providing an opportunity for self-reflection and a deeper understanding of their faith.
• Finding god in the details: Through their experiences, the author discovered the divine presence in the intricate details of nature, recognizing the interconnectedness of all living beings and the universe as a whole.
• Renewed faith: The essay traces the author’s journey of rediscovering their faith and the profound impact it had on their sense of purpose, inner strength, and overall well-being.

Essay Example 3: Seeking Enlightenment Through Mindfulness Practices

This essay example revolves around the author’s quest for enlightenment through mindfulness practices such as meditation, mindfulness exercises, and self-reflection.

It explores how these practices have contributed to their spiritual growth and quest for deeper understanding.

Embracing mindfulness: The author explains how incorporating mindfulness practices into their daily life helped them develop a heightened sense of awareness and presence, enabling them to experience a deeper connection with themselves and the world around them.

Navigating the inner landscape: The essay delves into the author’s process of self-discovery, highlighting the importance of introspection and exploring one’s thoughts and emotions as a means of uncovering truths and attaining spiritual enlightenment.

Letting go of attachments: The author reflects on the significance of detaching from material possessions, desires, and ego-driven ambitions, recognizing that true fulfillment and peace lie in letting go of attachments and finding contentment in the present moment.

Nurturing compassion and gratitude: The essay discusses how mindfulness practices have helped the author cultivate compassion for themselves and others, fostering a sense of interconnectedness and gratitude for the blessings in their life.

By exploring the personal stories and insights shared in these spiritual journey essays, we gain valuable perspectives on the transformative power of resilience, faith, nature, solitude, and mindfulness.

These examples serve as inspirations for our own spiritual journeys, reminding us of the profound potential for growth, peace, and enlightenment that lie within our reach.

Common Threads And Valuable Lessons From Diverse Spiritual Experiences

Discover the common threads and valuable lessons that emerge from a collection of diverse spiritual experiences.

These powerful essays exemplify the transformative nature of the spiritual journey. Explore the rich tapestry of personal insights and reflections that will uplift and inspire.

Spiritual journeys can take many forms, ranging from personal revelations to transformative experiences that shape one’s entire life.

These journeys are highly individual, reflecting the diversity of human experience and the pursuit of higher meaning.

While each spiritual journey is unique, there are common threads that connect them, as well as valuable lessons that can be learned along the way.

Acceptance And Surrender As Catalysts For Spiritual Growth

Acceptance: Embracing life as it is and accepting oneself without judgment can pave the way for spiritual growth.

By acknowledging and embracing our flaws, mistakes, and imperfections, we learn to cultivate self-compassion and develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and others.

Surrender: Letting go of control and surrendering to a higher power or divine guidance can lead to profound spiritual transformation.

It requires relinquishing the ego and trusting in the wisdom of the universe, allowing for greater alignment with one’s true purpose.

Finding Meaning And Purpose In Challenging Times

Resilience: Navigating difficult situations often prompts individuals to reflect on their values and priorities, leading to a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world.

Self-reflection: Challenging times provide an opportunity for introspection and self-discovery. Through introspection, individuals can uncover their core beliefs, values, and passions, enabling them to align their actions with their true purpose.

Inner strength: Adversity can reveal hidden reservoirs of strength that individuals didn’t know they possessed.

Finding meaning in difficult experiences helps cultivate resilience and empowers individuals to navigate future challenges with a sense of purpose and determination.

Developing Connection With The Divine And The Self

Meditation and mindfulness: Practices such as meditation and mindfulness enable individuals to quiet the mind, cultivate self-awareness, and deepen their connection with the divine.

By tuning into the present moment, one can access a profound sense of peace and a deeper connection to their spirituality.

Nature and the sacred: Many spiritual journeys involve finding solace and connection in nature. By immersing oneself in the beauty and awe of the natural world, individuals can tap into a sense of wonder and transcendence that nurtures their spiritual growth.

Authenticity and self-expression: Honoring one’s true self and expressing it authentically allows for a deepening connection with both the self and the divine.

When individuals embrace their unique gifts, talents, and passions, they align themselves with their spiritual essence and invite greater joy and fulfillment into their lives.

Each spiritual journey is a deeply personal exploration , guided by one’s own beliefs, experiences, and yearnings.

What unites these diverse journeys are the universal themes of acceptance, surrender, finding meaning in challenges, and developing a connection to the divine and the self.

Embracing these common threads and integrating the valuable lessons learned along the way can foster spiritual growth and fulfillment on the path to higher consciousness.

How Spiritual Journey Essays Inspire And Provoke Introspection In Others?

These examples of spiritual journey essays inspire profound introspection in readers by delving into the depths of personal experiences, offering insights and wisdom.

Embarking on such a journey through the pages of these essays evokes a sense of connection to something greater, stirring the reader’s own reflective thoughts.

Validation And Resonance For Those On A Similar Journey

• Spiritual journey essays provide a sense of validation and resonance for individuals who are embarking on a similar path of self-discovery and spiritual exploration.
• These essays offer a glimpse into the lived experiences, challenges, and triumphs of others who have walked a similar spiritual path, allowing readers to connect and feel understood in their own journey.
• Through the sharing of personal stories, these essays communicate a deep sense of empathy and companionship, reminding readers that they are not alone in their quest for spiritual fulfillment.
• The relatability of these essays fosters a sense of validation, assuring readers that their questions, doubts, and spiritual experiences are valid and worthy of exploration.

Expanding Perspectives And Challenging Beliefs

• Spiritual journey essays have the power to expand perspectives and challenge established beliefs by offering alternative ways of understanding and engaging with spirituality.
• By sharing their personal experiences, perspectives, and insights, authors of these essays invite readers to question their own beliefs and consider new possibilities.
• These essays prompt readers to critically examine their spiritual frameworks and beliefs, encouraging them to transcend limitations and explore a more expansive understanding of spirituality.
• Through thought-provoking narratives and reflections, spiritual journey essays invite readers to open their minds and embrace new ideas, paradigms, and spiritual paths.

Encouragement To Embark On One Unique Spiritual Exploration

• Spiritual journey essays serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration for individuals who are contemplating embarking on their own unique spiritual exploration.
• Through the sharing of transformative personal experiences, these essays ignite a sense of curiosity and yearning within readers, prompting them to seek their own spiritual paths.
• These essays highlight the transformative power of embarking on a spiritual journey and emphasize the importance of individual agency in forging one’s own path.
• By showcasing the profound personal growth, self-discovery, and fulfillment that often arises from embarking on a spiritual journey, these essays inspire readers to take that first step towards their own unique exploration.

How do African American spirituals reflect the theme of faith in your spiritual journey essays?

In your spiritual journey essays, you can explore the powerful theme of faith through African American spirituals examples . These soulful and emotive songs often express deep faith, resilience, and hope in the face of adversity. By analyzing these spirituals, you can gain valuable insights into the role of faith in your own spiritual journey.

Tips For Creating Impactful And Authentic Spiritual Journey Essays

Discover how to create impactful and authentic spiritual journey essays with these expert tips. Learn how to craft compelling narratives that resonate with readers, using vivid language and personal experiences to bring your spiritual journey to life.

Being vulnerable and sharing personal experiences:

• Share personal moments: Open up about the significant moments and experiences that have shaped your spiritual journey.
• Express emotions: Embrace vulnerability by sharing the emotional impact of your spiritual quest.
• Reflect on personal growth: Discuss the personal growth and lessons learned throughout your journey.
• Connect with readers: Create relatable content that resonates with readers by showcasing your authentic self.

Creating a narrative arc with a clear theme and message:

• Outline the structure: Start with an introduction to set the stage, followed by the development of your journey and its challenges, and conclude with a reflection or resolution.
• Establish a clear theme: Identify the central theme or message of your essay and ensure it is consistently conveyed throughout.
• Build a compelling storyline: Engage readers by crafting a narrative that allows them to follow your spiritual journey.
• Incorporate supporting details: Use vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and examples to enhance your narrative and reinforce your message.

Embracing the power of storytelling to captivate readers:

• Craft a captivating opening: Start with a hook that grabs readers’ attention and draws them into your narrative.
• Use descriptive language: Paint a vivid picture of the people, places, and experiences that have shaped your journey.
• Show, don’t tell: Engage readers through storytelling by providing concrete examples and allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
• Maintain a consistent voice: Establish a unique voice that reflects your personality and allows readers to connect with your story.

Remember, creating impactful and authentic spiritual journey essays requires vulnerability, a clear narrative structure, and the power of storytelling.

By incorporating these tips into your writing, you can captivate readers and leave a lasting impression with your essay.

Embarking on a spiritual journey through essay writing can be a transformative experience. It allows individuals to reflect, analyze, and connect with their inner selves in profound ways.

By reading spiritual journey essays, we gain insight into the struggles, triumphs, and personal growth of others, inspiring us to delve deeper into our own spirituality.

These essays serve as a reminder that everyone’s journey is unique, and there is no right or wrong path to follow.

As we immerse ourselves in these narratives, we discover the power of vulnerability and honesty, paving the way for self-discovery, enlightenment, and a deeper connection with the divine.

Through the power of storytelling, these essays offer solace, guidance, and a profound sense of community.

So, let these examples be a catalyst for your own spiritual exploration, allowing your inner light to shine brightly on your unique odyssey.

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The role of faith in spiritual growth.

• God is Faithful , Faith , Identity in Christ , God is Good , Starting with God

Everyone knows that faith plays a significant role in our spiritual growth , but practically speaking it either occupies too much or too little of our understanding. If our conception of spiritual growth is nothing more than self-effort, we will not experience life transformation.

But if every spiritual pothole is paved with “just trust God,” we will also miss out on true spiritual growth. This is not to detract from the centrality of faith in becoming more like Christ, only to understand its role, so we can better coach those whom we disciple.

In the Christian life there are certain truths that are either so formative, or so fragile, that your disciple may require special assistance in learning to hold them in the shopping cart of faith. As mature Christian we are used to toting these truths around like a handbag (such as the security of our salvation), but young Christians need to develop the spiritual muscles that we take for granted.

What follows is a partial list of these foundational truths that require the exertion of faith, and may require your assistance. It is in these areas that the need for faith is most acute and where the lack of it will have the greatest ramifications.

Faith and Forgiveness

Few of the great battles in life are ever won overnight, so it is safe to assume that your disciples will see many spiritual failures before they finally see the flag raised, hear the national anthem, take their place on the winner’s platform and the world is joined together under the Nike swoosh. It might be a small failure or a stunningly gross one, but in either case they will desperately need to experience God’s forgiveness.

The problem with many sins is that even after we’ve confessed them, it is difficult to feel cleansed, to not berate ourselves, and not suspect that God’s still fuming over the incident. When we sin we instinctively feel someone must pay a price. No one gets off easy. What we need to decide is who is going to pay. Your disciple will therefore move in one of the following directions:

• ALTERNATIVE #1 “I am pig swill.” This is one of the terms I use when beating myself up for having fallen into the same trap of sin, yet again. I’ve not copyrighted the phrase so feel free to use it. In essence, I’m crucifying myself for the sin. Yes, what Jesus did was nice, but I’m going to cover the tab—check, please. Someone must pay and rightfully it should be me, so I pound myself for my stupidity.
• ALTERATIVE #2 “You, you made me sin.” That “you” could be a person, Satan, or even God, but either way someone needs to take the fall for the sin I’ve just committed, and I’ll be darned if it’s going to be me.
• ALTERNATIVE #3 “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure that really was a sin.” Recognize that phrase? It’s called justification. As the word implies, we decide to make a judgment over and against our conscience, declaring that what we did was actually right, or at least not that wrong. Why go to the effort? Because someone must pay for sin, unless of course there is no sin and that’s what we’re shooting for in this approach: to eliminate the offense.
• ALTERNATIVE #4 “I couldn’t help myself, it’s just my personality.” Let’s call this rationalizing, which is equivalent to the courtroom plea of insanity. What I’m saying is, “Yes, it was sin, but I didn’t have the moral capacity to say ‘no.’” My personality was such, and circumstances were such, that I could do no other than what I did. The effectiveness of this strategy lies in how good you are at convincing yourself that it’s really not your fault. I’m pretty gullible, so I usually believe me.

Of course what makes this all unnecessary is that someone has already paid the price, Christ. What is needed is confession. The problem is that we can confess our sins while failing to employ faith. Faith involves a choice of the will to believe that God has forgiven us through Christ’s death, while turning a deaf ear to doubts. We reckon that God is more merciful than we can imagine and believe that through Christ’s death we are completely forgiven, and “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

We often ask our disciples to scribble out their sins on a piece of paper, and have them write the verse 1 John 1:9 across the list, and tear up the list. I see no expiration date on this exercise. It is effective because it develops the faith component of confession: a visual aid to under gird a young and underdeveloped faith muscle. It might be useful to walk your disciples through the different responses listed above to help them see where in the process of confession, they are failing to exercise faith. You must teach them confession but you must also teach them that confession involves faith.

Faith That God Can Make You Holy

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 1:6)

Most of the great heroes of the Bible share two things in common: they all wore sandals, and they were all required to persevere in their faith, though final victory was often years in the future. We, too—no matter how many setbacks we encounter—must never waiver in our belief that God can make us holy, and, if we persevere, will ultimately lead us in triumph.

Every disciple is willing to trust God for victory over sin at least once. The problem is when the war turns into Vietnam, with infrequent victories, heavy losses, and no foreseeable exit strategy. It is at this juncture that they need to know that faith is a long-term struggle and holiness a lifelong battle. Point to the many battles of faith in scripture fought and won over years, and not days. Show them how the Promised Land was taken one battle at a time.

When victory is elusive they will need someone to help make sense of it and prepare them for the long war. Without a proper perspective, they may resolve the conflict with a ceasefire, and an acceptance of behavior far from godliness. Help them persevere in the battle believing God will, in time, bring victory.

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

Here is another truth into which faith must sink its teeth: we must choose to believe that our temptations and struggles are not unique and therefore never insurmountable, unfixable, or unforgivable. It is a lie to believe that any temptation is irresistible, or that we are unique in any of our struggles.

God always provides what we need to remain holy, even if it’s simply an escape hatch. Every disciple is tempted to believe that in some area of their lives, they deviate from the norm. Satan desires for us to feel alone. You might ask your disciples if they have ever felt this way or in what area they tend to think of themselves as having unique trials or temptations. Forfeit faith in this area and you’ve dangerously increased the power of sin.

Faith That All Things Work For the Good

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).

The next battle of faith is for all those who have experienced damage in their lives, or within themselves, due to sin. God can take any manure and from it grow a garden, as you participate in this promise by faith. While it may be impossible to imagine how God can bring good out of our train wreck of past and present failures, this is hardly a limiting factor. For God can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

There is no limit to God’s capacity to redeem evil. Everything in our past can be taken and used for good. Every failure (like Peter’s failures) can be transformed by God’s mercy. Every weakness (like Paul’s weaknesses) can be a vehicle for God to demonstrate His strength. Though we must persevere in faith, and sometimes for years, the equation will always add up: crap + God = life. And faith is the means by which God enters the equation.

Through the examples of biblical characters such as Peter and Paul, and through examples from your own life, you must help your disciples strap on the shield of faith against the lie that anything in their lives is unredeemable, gratuitous, or random.

Faith in Our Reward

Now, there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day — and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing (2 Timothy 4:8).

Some years ago I was in China and like any tourist I visited the Great Wall. Along the bottom of the wall, a worker of this communist country was picking up trash. I clocked him at one piece of trash a minute, which at that rate would have taken him longer to clear the grounds than it took to build the Great Wall.

Where we visited included a maze of concession stands, tons of them—Great Concession stands. Someone told me that those who operated the stands employed principles of the free market, meaning that the more they sold and the more they charged for what they sold, the more they profited. One of the women at the booths actually grabbed my coat and dragged me to her counter. It would be an understatement to say that it was a motivated workforce.

The difference between these two workers was a chasm. Let’s call it the Great Chasm. One worked like a sluggard because he knew that he would always make the same amount no matter what he did (communism). The other worker knew that her effort would be rewarded (the free market).

The doctrine of eternal security (that we can never lose our salvation) was never meant to negate the teaching of rewards. In many places in the Bible, God makes it clear that our obedience and faithfulness will be rewarded. We are called to exercise faith in future rewards, choosing to believe that our actions or inaction will be compensated. When our minds move down the trail of “what difference will this really make?” the response of faith is—a lot. We are not told what these rewards will be, but simply given the assurance that it will be worth our while.

Teaching our disciples to maintain an eternal perspective, or to live for eternity, can cultivate their faith toward this truth, provided that our definition of what is eternal encompasses far more than evangelism, for Jesus states that even a cup of water given in his name will not fail to be rewarded.

Faith in God's Goodness

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11).

If you go back to the Garden of Eden (which is probably now a parking lot in downtown Baghdad), you will notice that the first sin was a distrust of God’s goodness. Adam and Eve became convinced that God was holding out on them. Eating from the tree was in their best interests. The foundation of most sin is a lack of faith in God’s goodness, and disbelief that His plans for us are really best.

When things are going wrong, we justify our sin with self-pity. We find ourselves thinking, “Well, I’m going to do this because God isn’t taking care of me anyway, and rather than helping, He’s allowing my life to disintegrate.” Such reasoning is designed by our scheming mind to bring us to a sense of entitlement to sin.

More innocuously, many of us fall prey to pessimism and distrust that what lies in wait over the time horizon is anything but good, often brought on by a nagging suspicion that God never did forget our sin, and payday is right around the bend.

We must fight the battle to deny or disbelieve God’s goodness, with faith, never giving an inch. Everything God does in our lives is motivated by love, and any minor deconstruction of that truth is a lie that can have serious ramifications.

In helping your disciples with this struggle, you might ask some questions to discover if their mind has a proclivity to move down this path. You might also share in what ways you tend to doubt the goodness of God. Intimacy with Christ is the best answer to any and all doubts of His goodness. When we feel close to Christ, we sense that He is on our side, and when we feel distant, we come to suspect that He is not.

Memorizing scripture is great, but passages of scripture are animated by our intimacy with Christ.

Identity: Identity Theft

“I got me some of them mud flaps with the naked ladies on them. Ohhh mamacita.”

In a series of ads for Citibank’s identity theft program, the viewer sits and listens to the thief who, having stolen the person’s credit card number, recounts their various bizarre purchases and exploits. What makes the ads humorous as well as memorable is the thief’s story is told (lip-synced) through the identity theft victim, sitting forlornly mouthing the words.

In some way we are all victims of identity theft. Having trusted Christ, we are heirs with Christ of all that is in Him. Most of us never fully grasp what God’s Word says is true of us in Christ, or worse, we simply don’t think about it. We are children of God, chosen before time to be in the family of God, yet these concepts don’t make it to the starting line-up of thoughts that propel us into the day.

In the movie "Cheaper by the Dozen," the youngest child is treated as the family outcast. The other kids call him “FedEx” because they suspect he was adopted and simply delivered to the family, not born into it. Over the course of time he begins to believe it, rumors become a lie, and the lie grows in power until he runs away from the family believing he has no place within it. There’s a message from an otherwise boring movie: our identity matters.

Our faith in our identity in Christ is absolutely foundational to our lives. Faith is fed by reading the Bible. “The Daily Affirmation of Faith” was written to provide a concise, clear statement of the truth of God’s Word as it applies to our victory in Christ (what is true of us in Him). Commend it to your disciples for daily reading particularly during times of deep trials and temptation when they are most prone to forget who they truly are, and believe things about themselves and God which are not true.

The Daily Affirmation of Faith

Today I deliberately choose to submit myself fully to God as He has made Himself known to me through the Holy Scripture, which I honestly accept as the only inspired, infallible, authoritative standard for all life and practice. In this day I will not judge God, His work, myself, or others on the basis of feelings or circumstances.

I recognize by faith that the triune God is worthy of all honor, praise, and worship as the Creator, Sustainer, and End of all things. I confess that God, as my Creator, made me for Himself. In this day, I therefore choose to live for Him. (Revelation 5:9-10; Isaiah 43:1,7,21; Revelation 4:11)

I recognize by faith that God loved me and chose me in Jesus Christ before time began (Ephesians 1:1-7).

I recognize by faith that God has proven His love to me in sending His Son to die in my place, in whom every provision has already been made for my past, present, and future needs through His representative work, and that I have been quickened, raised, seated with Jesus Christ in the heavenlies, and anointed with the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:6-11; 8:28; Philippians 1:6; 4:6,7,13,19; Ephesians 1:3; 2:5,6; Acts 2:1-4,33).

I recognize by faith that God has accepted me, since I have received Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord (John 1:12; Ephesians 1:6); that He has forgiven me (Ephesians 1:7); adopted me into His family, assuming every responsibility for me (John 17:11,17; Ephesians 1:5; Philippians 1:6); given me eternal life (John 3:36; 1 John 5:9-13); applied the perfect righteousness of Christ to me so that I am now justified (Romans 5:1; 8:3-4; 10:4); made me complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10); and offers Himself to me as my daily sufficiency through prayer and the decisions of faith (1 Corinthians 1:30; Colossians 1:27; Galatians 2:20; John 14:13-14; Matthew 21:22; Romans 6:1-19; Hebrews 4:1-3,11).

I recognize by faith that the Holy Spirit has baptized me into the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13); sealed me (Ephesians 1:13-14); anointed me for life and service (Acts 1:8; John 7:37-39); seeks to lead me into a deeper walk with Jesus Christ (John 14:16-18; 15:26-27; 16:13-15; Romans 8:11-16); and to fill my life with Himself (Ephesians 5:18).

I recognize by faith that only God can deal with sin and only God can produce holiness of life. I confess that in my salvation my part was only to receive Him and that He dealt with my sin and saved me. Now I confess that in order to live a holy life, I can only surrender to His will and receive Him as my sanctification; trusting Him to do whatever may be necessary in my life, without and within, so I may be enabled to live today in purity, freedom, rest and power for His glory. (John 1:12; 1 Corinthians 1:30; 2 Corinthians 9:8; Galatians 2:20; Hebrew 4:9; 1 John 5:4; Jude 24).

Our Salvation

We’ll conclude with the most fundamental of truths, and ground zero for faith. All things build upon this.

Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12).

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:13).

In describing our spiritual armor, Paul uses a helmet to illustrate the truth of our salvation: that which protects the mind, and protects us from a fatal blow. We make it a critical part of basic follow-up, because scripture affirms that it is. Let your disciples doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Let them doubt that the Cubs will ever win a World Series. But, rehearse this with them until that helmet cannot be pried off their head.

How Faith Grows

Faith is like a muscle; it grows by lifting weights. Weights are the resistance—the doubts, mental whispers, and circumstances that tell us the opposite of what faith must believe.

When God seems absent and horrible circumstances swirl around us, everything seems to shout, “God isn’t here! And if He is, He certainly doesn’t care.” In those circumstances, faith curls the barbell toward the heart and says, “No, God is good. He is for me. He has a plan.” Thus, it is the circumstances adverse to our faith that become the vehicle for our growth—they are the weight on the barbell.

And so all disciples are periodically tossed into a boat and sent out into a raging storm, where God is conspicuous by his absence. We are not trying to rescue our disciples from the situations and circumstances that will cause faith to grow. Our role is to come alongside them, strengthen their feeble arms and help them to curl the heavy weights that will cause their faith to bulk-up. (I think I just described a steroid.)

God provides the weight (adverse circumstances and trials), but they must continue to lift the weight. We must spot them helping them push out more repetitions than they thought possible while making sure the barbell doesn’t pin them to the bench-press.

Alternatively, faith grows through new challenges and we serve our disciples well by calling them into circumstances where they will need to trust and rely on God. They take courageous steps, God shows Himself faithful, and their faith grows.

Through the stress and strain of faith development, the truths discussed in this article are the most common fracture points, and the places your disciples may most need your encouragement to wind their way up the hill of faith.

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Previous story, let the nations be glad, good old grace, latest stories in beginning with god - blog, a desire to journey, a desire for god.

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Religion and spirituality: What are the fundamental differences?

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Religion vs. Spirituality: Finding the Difference Essay

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Religion is a distinct body of organized ideas and behaviors that a group of people often embraces. Religion is a set of different traditions, dogmas, and ways of thinking that link spirituality and, at least, moral ideals to mankind. Numerous faiths use tales, rituals, practices, and holy narratives to describe the purpose of existence or the genesis of life and the world. Spirituality is mostly an individual activity with a feeling of calm and meaning. It is also associated with forming beliefs about the purpose of life and relationships with other people. Relationships with a higher entity and an ontological view of life, dying, and reality are central to spirituality (Loue, 2018). Religious beliefs involve praying, meditation, and interaction with other religious community members.

A critical distinction between Religion and spirituality is wanting to believe vs. being. Religion stresses the substance of adherents’ thoughts and the manner in which those ideas manifest in daily lives. On the other side, spirituality emphasizes the process of getting connected to the inner self. Spirituality is the unique connection with the Creator of a particular interpretation. Religion is a collection of individuals who serve the same Deity. Everyone shares the same concept of Religion, which is generally defined in historical theology or sacred literature. Spirituality is a solitary endeavor (Jenkins et al., 2018). Every encounter in our life affords us the opportunity to depart from or approach the reality of ourselves, a spirit living a human existence.

Spirituality is a concept people independently find and acquire, and there exist no guidelines for communicating with spirit. Spirituality is your identity since, at heart, a person becomes the spirit living a subjective existence. Spirituality is inclusive of many viewpoints and whichever viewpoint connects with a person becomes their reality. Regardless of the position that disturbs a person, it is not their reality. Spirituality emphasizes the significance of living in the present moment. Non-resistance to the immediate stage will only generate further hostility to it. By identifying with the current situation, one is reminded of their genuine power source and can connect with it. Spirituality revolves around present happiness, and this is because experiencing happiness is experiencing righteousness. Through emotions, my internal control system directs me to where I am required to go. This control explains the trick to creating a life exceeding my wildest imaginings to feel happy. Spirituality does not criticize anybody or any actions; someone can have a viewpoint on a subject, but that view does not have any emotional baggage. Thus, spirituality respects many viewpoints, so it is not necessary to advocate for a single truth. Spirituality and religion may coexist happily, and even though they are distinct from religion, spirituality does not need to protect itself from religion. The two may coexist because one complements the other.

Spirituality’s involvement in professional nursing includes satisfying the patient’s spiritual care requirements, which may contribute to physical healing, pain reduction, and personal development. To treat the patient’s comprehensive requirements, the physician must address physical and emotional requirements. Scholars concur that spiritual nursing care promotes spiritual health and well-being by establishing loving connections and connectivity between the physician and the patient. Spirituality, meditation, and prayers may help well-being via supportive behaviors, compassion, and fortitude, and it might even be therapeutic (Jenkins et al., 2018). Enhancing a patient’s spiritual health might not heal a health condition, but it might make the patient feel better. As a nurse, I understand that to offer efficacious spiritual care, I should be aware of the patient’s perceptions of life and death. In addition, I should be able to distinguish between religious and spiritual needs and identify the appropriate spiritual intervention strategies.

Jenkins W. Tucker M. E. & Grim J. (2018). Routledge handbook of religion and ecology . Routledge.

Loue S. (2018). Handbook of religion and spirituality in social work practice and research. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Puchalski, C. (2021). Spiritual care in health care: Guideline, models, spiritual assessment and the use of the ©FICA spiritual history tool . Spiritual Needs in Research and Practice , 27–45. Web.

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What's the Difference Between Religion and Spirituality?

Is Religion Organized Spirituality? Is Spirituality Personalized Religion?

• Belief Systems
• Key Figures in Atheism
• M.A., Princeton University
• B.A., University of Pennsylvania

One popular idea is that there exists a distinction between two different modes of relating with the divine or the sacred: religion and spirituality. Religion describes the social, the public, and the organized means by which people relate to the sacred and the divine, while spirituality describes such relations when they occur in private, personally, and even in ways.

Is such a distinction valid?

In answering this questions, it's important to remember that it presumes to describe two fundamentally different types of things. Even though I describe them as different ways of relating to the divine or the sacred, that's already introducing my own prejudices into the discussion. Many (if not most) of those who attempt to draw such a distinction don't describe them as two aspects of the same thing; instead, they're supposed to be two completely different animals.

It's popular, especially in America, to completely separate between spirituality and religion. It's true that there are differences, but there are also a number of problematic distinctions which people try to make. In particular, supporters of spirituality often argue that everything bad lies with religion while everything good can be found in spirituality. This is a self-serving distinction which masks the nature of religion and spirituality.

Religion vs. Spirituality

One clue that there's something fishy about this distinction comes when we look at the radically different ways people try to define and describe that distinction. Consider these three definitions drawn from the internet:

• Religion is an institution established by man for various reasons. Exert control, instill morality, stroke egos, or whatever it does. Organized, structured religions all but remove god from the equation. You confess your sins to a clergy member, go to elaborate churches to worship, are told what to pray and when to pray it. All those factors remove you from god. Spirituality is born in a person and develops in the person. It may be kick started by a religion, or it may be kick started by a revelation. Spirituality extends to all facets of a person's life. Spirituality is chosen while religion is often times forced. Being spiritual to me is more important and better than being religious.
• Religion can be anything that the person practicing it desires. Spirituality, on the other hand, is defined by God. Since religion is man defined, religion is a manifestation of the flesh. But spirituality, as defined by God, is a manifestation of His nature.
• True spirituality is something that is found deep within oneself. It is your way of loving, accepting and relating to the world and people around you. It cannot be found in a church or by believing in a certain way.

These definitions aren't just different, they are incompatible! Two define spirituality in a way which makes it dependent upon the individual; it is something that develops in the person or is found deep within oneself. The other, however, defines spirituality as something which comes from God and is defined by God while religion is anything that the person desires. Is spirituality from God and religion from man, or is it the other way around? Why such divergent views?

Even worse, I've found the three above definitions copied onto numerous websites and blog posts in attempts to promote spirituality over religion. Those doing the copying ignore the source and disregard the fact that they are contradictory!

We can better understand why such incompatible definitions (each representative of how many, many others define the terms) appear by observing what unites them: the denigration of religion. Religion is bad. Religion is all about people controlling other people. Religion distances you from God and from the sacred. Spirituality, whatever it really is, is good. Spirituality is the true way to reach God and the sacred. Spirituality is the right thing to center your life on.

Problematic Distinctions Between Religion and Spirituality

One principal problem with attempts to separate religion from spirituality is that the former is saddled with everything negative while the latter is exalted with everything positive. This is a totally self-serving way of approaching the issue and something you only hear from those who describe themselves as spiritual. You never hear a self-professed religious person offer such definitions and it's disrespectful to religious people to suggest that they would remain in a system with no positive characteristics whatsoever.

Another problem with attempts to separate religion from spirituality is the curious fact that we don't see it outside America. Why are people in Europe either religious or irreligious but Americans have this third category called spiritual? Are Americans special? Or is it rather that distinction is really just a product of American culture?

In fact, that is exactly the case. The term itself came to be used frequently only after the 1960s, when there were widespread revolts against every form of organized authority, including organized religion. Every establishment and every system of authority was thought to be corrupt and evil, including those which were religious.

However, Americans weren't prepared to abandon religion entirely. Instead, they created a new category which was still religious, but which no longer included the same traditional authority figures.

They called it spirituality. Indeed, the creation of the category spiritual can be seen as just one more step in the long American process of privatizing and personalizing religion, something which has occurred constantly throughout American history.

It's no wonder that courts in the Americas have refused to acknowledge any substantive difference between religion and spirituality, concluding that spiritual programs are so much like religions that it would violate their rights to force people to attend them (as with Alcoholics Anonymous, for example). The religious beliefs of these spiritual groups do not necessarily lead people to the same conclusions as organized religions, but that doesn't make them less religious.

Valid Distinctions Between Religion and Spirituality

This is not to say that there is nothing at all valid in the concept of spirituality—just that the distinction between spirituality and religion in general is not valid. Spirituality is a form of religion, but a private and personal form of religion. Thus, the valid distinction is between spirituality and organized religion.

We can see this in how there is little (if anything) that people describe as characterizing spirituality but which has not also characterized aspects of traditional religion. Personal quests for God? Organized religions have made a great deal of room for such quests. Personal understandings of God? Organized religions have relied heavily upon the insights of mystics, although they have also sought to circumscribe their influence so as not to rock the boat too much and too quickly.

Moreover, some of the negative features commonly attributed to religion can also be found in so-called spiritual systems. Is religion dependent upon a book of rules? Alcoholics Anonymous describes itself as spiritual rather than religious and has such a book. Is religion dependent upon a set of written revelations from God rather than a personal communication? A Course in Miracles is a book of such revelations which people are expected to study and learn from.

It is important to note the fact that many of the negative things which people attribute to religions are, at best, features of some forms of some religions (usually Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but not of other religions (like Taoism or Buddhism). This is perhaps why so much of spirituality remains attached to traditional religions , like attempts to soften their harder edges. Thus, we have Jewish spirituality, Christian spirituality, and Muslim spirituality.

Religion is spiritual and spirituality is religious. One tends to be more personal and private while the other tends to incorporate public rituals and organized doctrines. The lines between one and the other are not clear and distinct—they are all points on the spectrum of belief systems known as religion. Neither religion nor spirituality is better or worse than the other; people who try to pretend that such a difference does exist are only fooling themselves.

• Nonbeliever vs. Atheist
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• Introduction to Theism and Atheism
• The Difference Between Atheists and Agnostics
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• What's the Difference Between Nontheism and Atheism?
• The Similarities Between Religion and Philosophy
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• What is an Antipope?
• What Is Secularism?
• Definition: Religious Authority Vs. Secular Authority
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Select Page

Spirituality is a broad and subjective concept that encompasses a sense of connection to something greater than oneself. It often involves exploring questions about the meaning of life, the nature of existence, and the purpose of our existence.

Different cultures, belief systems, and philosophies have their own interpretations of spirituality. For some, it is linked to organized religion and faith in a higher power or deity. For others, it may be more secular, focusing on inner peace, mindfulness, and a sense of interconnectedness with the universe.

Hello, I have a similar line of thought. I am atheist but things fell into place about all this a few months ago I did not need to throw away the idea of the all-powerful after all. It is not God. It is greater than all Gods and religions. Some religions believe almost the same thing. The “all powerful all” is simply the totality of what is. It had no mind or beingness at first. It was what we call the big bang. Life evolved with no designer or God. This totality still is all and still has all power. Sentients is within it. We serve the all powerful and its servant. This is a very big very old universe. I speculate very advanced extremely advanced beings are here and can be connected to with prayer and mediation. Of course they agree with spiritual atheism. They also know about the all powerful all. It is where they came from just like us. please check out my website www/thewayoffairness.com.

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Spirituality — The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality

The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality

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Introduction, definitions and frameworks, practices and expressions, impacts on individual and communal life.

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Essay on Religion And Spirituality

Students are often asked to write an essay on Religion And Spirituality in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Religion And Spirituality

Understanding religion.

Religion is a system of beliefs that people follow. It includes rules about how to behave, what to eat, and how to worship. Some well-known religions are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. These religions have holy books, like the Bible or the Quran, which guide their followers.

Exploring Spirituality

Spirituality is more about a personal journey. It’s about finding inner peace and understanding the deeper meaning of life. It’s not tied to a specific set of rules or a holy book. Some people find spirituality through meditation, nature, or art.

Religion and Spirituality: The Connection

Religion and spirituality are often linked but they are not the same. Religion can be a path to spirituality. For example, praying can help people feel more connected to something bigger than themselves. But you can also be spiritual without following a religion.

Differences Between Religion and Spirituality

The main difference between religion and spirituality is freedom. With religion, you follow a set of rules. With spirituality, you make your own path. Some people prefer the structure of religion. Others prefer the freedom of spirituality.

Combining Religion and Spirituality

250 words essay on religion and spirituality, understanding religion and spirituality.

Religion and spirituality are two terms often used together, but they have different meanings. Religion refers to a set of beliefs and practices agreed upon by a group of people. These beliefs often involve a higher power or deity. On the other hand, spirituality is a personal journey. It involves a person’s connection with their inner self, the world around them, and sometimes, a higher power.

Religion: A Group Experience

Religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have many followers. Each religion has its own rules, rituals, and holy books. These guide how people should live their lives. For example, Christians read the Bible and Muslims read the Quran. These books give people a path to follow to live a good life.

Spirituality: A Personal Journey

Spirituality is different. It is not about following a set path. It is about finding one’s own path. This could involve meditation, spending time in nature, or helping others. Some people may even choose to follow parts of different religions. The goal is to find peace and happiness within oneself.

The Connection Between Religion and Spirituality

Religion and spirituality can be connected. Many people find spirituality in their religion. They feel a deep connection with the higher power they worship. Others may not follow a religion but still be spiritual. They may find a connection with the world around them or within themselves.

In conclusion, religion and spirituality are two sides of the same coin. They both seek to answer big questions about life, purpose, and connection. Each person chooses their own way to explore these questions. Whether through religion, spirituality, or both, the journey is a personal one.

500 Words Essay on Religion And Spirituality

What is religion.

Religion is a set of beliefs, rituals, and practices that people follow. These are often shared by a group or community. Religions usually have holy books, like the Bible for Christians or the Quran for Muslims. These books guide people on how to live their lives. People who follow a religion often go to a special place, like a church or a mosque, to pray or worship.

What is Spirituality?

Spirituality is more about personal experience. It is about finding your own path and making sense of your life. It does not have set rules like religion. Some people find spirituality in nature, while others find it in art or music. It is a personal journey that is different for everyone.

Difference Between Religion and Spirituality

Connection between religion and spirituality.

While religion and spirituality are different, they are also connected. Many people find spirituality through their religion. They use their religious beliefs to guide their spiritual journey. At the same time, some people who do not follow a religion still consider themselves spiritual. They may not follow a set of religious rules, but they still seek meaning and purpose in their lives.

Importance of Religion and Spirituality

Both religion and spirituality play a big role in people’s lives. They can provide comfort, guidance, and a sense of purpose. They can help people cope with difficulties and make sense of the world around them. They can also bring people together and create a sense of community.

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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality

Glen G. Scorgie, Bethel University

Journal Details

Manuscripts should follow the endnote system specified in the latest edition of the  Chicago Manual of Style . All text must be double-spaced in a clear, easy-to-read twelve-point typeface on 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages. Text should be left justified with all margins one inch. Submissions should use endnotes. You may cite your own work, but do not use wording that identifies you as the author. Essays are generally not to exceed 7,500 words, including endnotes and other printed matter.  Spiritus  will acknowledge receipt of your manuscript, but will not return it after review. Prospective contributors are encouraged to correspond with the editors prior to submitting manuscripts.

Decisions are generally made within twelve weeks of receipt. Manuscripts are subjected to blind reviews. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to submit an abstract of less than 100 words, along with 5-6 keywords. You will also be expected to obtain permission to reproduce any copyrighted materials used in your essay.

Submit manuscripts as Word documents, along with a brief biographical statement, electronically to:

Glen G. Scorgie, PhD             Bethel University           email:  [email protected]

Inquiries concerning book reviews should be made to:

Amanda Avila Kaminski, PhD             Texas Lutheran University             email:  [email protected]

Poetry submissions should be made to: 

Mark Burrows, PhD              University of Applied Sciences, Bochum (Germany)             email:  [email protected]

Include up to five poems in a single attached Word document, also with a short biographical statement. Work already published or under consideration elsewhere will not be considered.  

Additional Information for Authors

Spiritus  will consider for publication essays written on topics that pertain to the discipline of Christian spirituality. The journal is committed to creative engagement with Christian tradition and to critical reflection on the relationship of Christian spirituality with non-Christian religious traditions. We encourage interdisciplinary inquiry into the subject of spirituality that engages such fields as literature and the arts, philosophy, science and politics. We encourage authors to submit essays that focus on the contemporary situation and speak to current issues and debates.

All essays submitted to  Spiritus  are subjected to a blind, peer-review process. Therefore please omit any information that would identify you as author.

Style Sheet for Essays

• Use a 12-point font (Times New Roman is preferred), with 24-point (double line) spacing for all text, including endnotes.
• Indent each new paragraph; do not leave extra space between paragraphs.
• Number the pages, but do not include any other information in headers or footers.
• Do not include a bibliography or a list of works consulted. Full bibliographical information for any work consulted will appear only in the first endnote that refers to that work.

2. Spelling and Editing

• Unless this style sheet has different instructions, follow The Chicago Manual of Style on general editing questions.
• Use U.S. spelling and punctuation, except in quoted material using U.K. style.
• Use the final “series comma” in lists of three or more items.
• Use italics for emphasis, book and journal titles, and foreign words. Do not use underlining or bolding at all.
• Do not use page, section, or endnote numbers that refer, within your article, to the article itself.
• When there is any question as to capitalization, do not capitalize words.
• Omit hyphens wherever possible.
• Omit bullet points.
• Greek and Hebrew words, which should be used sparingly, must be transliterated and italicized.
• Use only one space to separate sentences.

3. Biblical Citations

References to the Bible may be included within the text of the essay, in parentheses, before the final punctuation of the sentence. Use the shorter abbreviations of biblical books in the Chicago Manual . Separate chapter from verse with a colon. The version you are quoting should be mentioned in the first citation only, preferably by its accepted acronym, as in the following example:

(2 Cor 5:17, NRSV)

4. Abbreviations

Spiritus does not use any Latin abbreviations. Use English phrases instead of i.e., etc., and e.g.

5. General Matters of Style

• Spiritus is read not only by scholars, but also by an educated general audience. When technical or specialized terminology is necessary, explain it.
• Wherever possible, use gender-inclusive language.
• Write in the active, not the passive voice. Avoid the “editorial we .” First-person singular pronouns are quite acceptable.
• In longer articles, include headings and, if necessary, subheadings. In general, these should not be numbered.
• Spiritus readers are diverse; therefore, do not presume that all share your own personal commitments.

6. Endnotes

            6.1        General Rule for Endnotes

The general rule is simple. Your first citation of a published work should give all the relevant information. Every reference thereafter should contain only three items: the original author’s last name, a short title for the book or article, and the relevant page number(s).

Spiritus does not use ibid. or loc. cit. or op. cit .

            6.2        First Endnote—Books

In the first endnote for a book, give the author’s name, the title, and (in parentheses) the place of publication, publisher, and date; the page number follows, as in this example. 1

1 Cristina Mazzoni, The Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing (New York: Continuum, 2005), 33–37.

            6.3        First Endnote—Article

For an article, the order is: author’s name, title of the article, name of the journal, volume number, year (in parentheses), and after a colon and a space, the page number.

2 Belden C. Lane, “Merton’s Hermitage: Bachelard, Domestic Space, and Spiritual Transformation,” Spiritus 4, no. 1 (2004): 128.

            6.4        First Endnote—Chapters in an Edited Book

The form for a chapter in an edited book is like this. 3

3 Constance FitzGerald, “Impasse and the Dark Night,” in Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, 2nd ed., ed. Joann Wolksi Conn (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 428–30.

            6.5        First Endnote—Source Accessed Online

The format is the same as the examples above, but with some additional information indicating the source’s online location. This is most commonly indicated by either a DOI 4 or a website address (URL). 5 If the source is undated, also indicate the date it was accessed. Links should be in the same color as the rest of the text and not underlined.

4 Philip Sheldrake, “God’s Meaning Is Love: The Mystical Theology of Julian of Norwich,” Acta Theologica 32 (2022): 89–103, https://doi.org/10.18820/23099089/actat.sup33.8.

5 Kerry Weber, “Sewing and Praying: Piecing Together the Fabrics of Prayer,” accessed January 18, 2023, https:/www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/prayer/arts-and-faith/visual-arts/sewing-and-praying/.

            6.6        Subsequent Endnotes

Once complete information has been given, use a short title (which you should determine) in each subsequent endnote, whether of a book 6 or an article or chapter. 7

6 Mazzoni, The Women in God’s Kitchen , 131.

7 FitzGerald, “Impasse and Dark Night,” 415.

            6.7        Some Additional Instructions

• References to classical works that have been published in many editions and translations should be numbered according to the original scheme. 8 It is for the author to decide whether to include, as well, information about the modern edition consulted. If you do include this, it should follow the usual format for books as outlined above.

8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q. 2 a. 1 reply; see also Augustine, De Trinitate VIII 4 (6).

• The ban on Latin abbreviations includes cf. Write “see” or “see also” or “compare” or “consult,” depending on what you mean.
• Longer, explanatory endnotes that include bibliographical information should include it in the format prescribed here. 9 For example, the endnote may itself include a quotation.

9 According to Sedgwick, “Of these articles, only Rachel Hosmer provides a view of the field” (Sedgwick, “Accounting,” 177).

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Submission Policy 

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (SCS)  accepts solicited and unsolicited manuscripts. They must be:

• Original work
• Non-simultaneous submission
• Translations accepted with permissions from author or author estate, unless translation in public domain
• Photos and other images are chosen by editorial staff and permissions procured by editorial staff with aid of artist or artist’s estate if needed, unless in public domain
• Reprints generally not permitted

Preliminary Review

• Is conducted by the Editor, Managing Editor, and/or Assistant Editor for weak or unsuitable submissions

Peer Review

• SCS  does  double blind  reviewing for all papers not rejected in preliminary review.

Criteria for Review

What is main aim of the paper? Does the paper succeed in its aim? Do you think it is a worthwhile project? Do you recommend (please pick one):

Review Results and Revisions Required

a) Unconditional acceptance b) Acceptance subject to small revisions c) Acceptance subject to substantial revisions d) Rejection but a positive encouragement to revise and resubmit e) Rejection but a non-committal invitation to resubmit a substantially revised edition f) Rejection     If you recommend f) Is this due to      a) The poor quality of the paper?      b) The paper being inappropriate for the journal?

4-6 weeks for review process

From submission to publication great variation: 4 to 10 (on occasion, 12) months

Informal Pieces 

Occasional “Perspectives” essays; determined as “Perspectives” by Editor, same review (double blind) process.

Interim Editor

Book review editor.

Amanda Avila Kaminski,  Texas Lutheran University

Poetry Editor

Mark Burrows,  The University of Applied Sciences, Bochum, Germany

Managing Editor

Alison S. Britton, Consulting Services, Inc.

Editorial Board

Michael Battle,  PeaceBattle Institute     Lisa E. Dahill,  Hartford International University for Religion and Peace     Pieter G.R. de Villiers,  University of the Free State     Rebecca G. Giselbrecht,  University of Bern  Lisa M. Hess, United Theological Seminary     Bo Karen Lee,  Princeton Theological Seminary     Francis X. McAloon, SJ, Fordham University    John Anthony McGuckin, University of Oxford    Pan Yi Jung,  China Graduate School of Theology, Hong Kong     Michael O’Sullivan, SJ,  Spirituality Institute for Research and Education, Dublin     David B. Perrin, St. Jerome’s University    Philip Sheldrake,  Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge     Claire E. Wolfteich,  Boston University School of Theology     Simeon Zahl,  University of Cambridge

Advisory Editors

John Chryssavgis,  Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America     Sarah Coakley,  Cambridge University     Joann Wolski Conn,  Neumann College     Georgia Frank,  Colgate University     Amy Hollywood,  Harvard Divinity School     Belden C. Lane,  St. Louis University     Bernard McGinn,  University of Chicago Divinity School     Barbara Newman,  Northwestern University     Hugh Page,  University of Notre Dame     William Reiser, SJ,  College of Holy Cross     Janet K. Ruffing, RSM,  Yale Divinity School     Don E. Saliers,  Candler School of Theology, Emory University     Sandra M. Schneiders,  Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University     Columba Stewart, OSB,  Saint John’s University     Rowan Williams,  Magdalene College, Cambridge University     Philip Zaleski,  Smith College

Send books for review to:

Amanda Avila Kaminski, PhD Assistant Professor of Theology Texas Lutheran University 1000 West Court Street Seguin, Texas 78155 email:  [email protected]

Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Web of Science
• Dietrich's Index Philosophicus
• IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur
• Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur
• Academic Search Complete
• ATLA Religion Database (American Theological Library Association), 2001-2016
• Christian Periodical Index, 2006-2012
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• Scopus, 2009-
• Guide to Social Work, Social Science and Religion in Periodical Literature (Online)
• ArticleFirst, vol.1, no.1, 2001-vol.10, no.2, 2010
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.1, no.1, 2001-vol.10, no.2, 2010
• ProQuest 5000
• ProQuest Central, 04/01/2017-
• Religion Database, 04/01/2017-

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

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The Role of Religion, Spirituality and Faith in Development: a critical theory approach

2009, Third World Quarterly

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Marie Petersen

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Mahmud Mukhtar Muhammed

Since the early 1990s, faith seems to have been staking a very strong return to policy, practice and scholarship. In this desk review therefore, the potential of faith as a tool for development and social provisioning is analysed from the international and Ghanaian perspectives. To overcome the negative tags associated with faith organisations and ensure their effectiveness and efficiency, the piece recommends inter and intra-faith collaboration, knowledge sharing and capacity building. The over-arching policy implication of the piece is that while faith has its own downside like any other development approach, it is still useful for promoting holistic development if stakeholders in development would engage with, encourage and positively promote faith-based organisations.

Emma Tomalin

R. Michael Feener , Philip Fountain

This volume, and the discussions out of which it developed, has aimed to expand upon and redirect work on the intersections of religion and development through examinations — on both conceptual and ethnographic levels — of the changing configurations of these categories within and across particular political contexts. In the late 1990s, a number of major development donors “re-discovered” religion, and against a long history of neglect and omission, began a remarkable new phase of proactive engagement (Jones and Petersen 2011; Marshall and Keough 2004; Rees 2011). Following on from this, the topic of religion and development has received increasing attention in international development circles, as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers sought to understand religious actors and the relevance of religion to their work. This has generated a significant number of reports, conferences, policy statements, and academic commentary.

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Attempts to break away from the domination of economistic and modernizing perspectives have paved way for more socially and culturally meaningful development practices. Many of the academics and practitioners have started to look for the ways in which ethical frameworks, moral orders, belief systems, spiritual underpinnings, or religious practices pertinent to local peoples' lives can be taken more perceptively on board while policies, programmes and interventions are conceptualized, designed, operationalized, or evaluated. The main aim of this write-up is to explain the relationship between religion and development in its historical context, and it also attempts to show how the Western-secular bias has created ground for inadequate and misleading appreciation religion's role in the life of people of the developing countries. We first explore the ways in which mainstream development narrative has treated religion in most part of its history: as a phenomenon to be ignored or unaccounted for. Then we briefly examine the contemporary contexts which pave way to bring this understanding to the fore that religion could play a substantial role in the process of development. If development is conceptualized as responsible, ethical and shared way of living, there would be greater scope for religion to become relevant and influential.

Billy C Sichone

This paper attempts to make the case for Religion in Development. It argues that true, authentic Religion is never at odds with development. Arguments are drawn from different angles and sources to prove that Religion, in fact is beneficial to development rather than detrimental. The Protestant religion, emanating from the Reformation is especially applauded.

Heather Marquette

Description With eighty per cent of the world’s population professing religious faith, religious belief is a common human characteristic. The sacred texts of each of the world’s major religions exhort believers to live a righteous life, including responding to poverty and assisting those with less. This fascinating and unique Handbook highlights the value of incorporating religion into development studies literature and research. It argues that as religious identity is integral to a community’s culture, exclusion of religious consideration will limit successful development interventions and therefore it is necessary to conflate examination of religion and development to enhance efforts aimed at improving the lives of the poor. Contents: 1. Understanding the Nexus between Religion and Development Matthew Clarke PART I: RELIGIOUS FAITH AND DEVELOPMENT 2. Islam as Aid and Development Peter Riddell 3. Buddhism and Development Emma Tomalin and Caroline Starkey 4. Christianity and International Development Séverine Deneulin 5. Judaism – A Cry for Justice Matthew Clarke 6. Hinduism and Development A. Whitney Sanford 7. Sikhism and Development: A Perfect Match? Darshan S. Tatla 8. Daoism and Development James Miller 9. Confucianism Xiangshu Fang and Lijun Bi 10. Indigenous Religions and Development: African Traditional Religion Namawu Alhassan Alolo and James Astley Connell 11. Name It and Claim It: Prosperity Gospel and the Global Pentecostal Reformation Matthew Sharpe PART II: DEVELOPMENT ISSUES/THEMES AND RELIGION 13. Gender, Religion and Development Emma Tomalin 14. Moral Power at the Religion–Development–Environment Nexus Cynthia Moe-Lobeda with Frederica Helmiere 15. Corruption, Religion and Moral Development Heather Marquette 16. Islamic Education: Historical Evolution and Attempts at Reform Masooda Bano 17. Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Development Shawn Teresa Flanigan 18. Religion in the Policy Domains of International Financial Institutions John Rees 19. A Sustainable Islamic Microfinance Model in Poverty Alleviation Aimatul Yumina 20. Religion and Post-Disaster Development Ismet Fanany and Rebecca Fanany 21. Religious Symbolism and the Politics of Urban Space Development Yamini Narayanan 22. Cultural Heritage and Development in South East Asia Jonathan Sweet and Jo Wills PART III: FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS AND MISSION 23. ‘Do Not Turn Away a Poor Man’: Faith-based Organizations and Development Michael Jennings 24. ‘Pan-Islamism’ as a Form of ‘Alter-globalism’? Hizb Ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Khilafah State Bruno De Cordier 25. Religion and Development: Prospects and Pitfalls of Faith-based Organizations Gerhard Hoffstaedter and David Tittensor 26. Mission, Missionaries and Development Steve Bradbury 27. Why Western-based, Pentecostal Mission Organizations Undertake Community Development in South East Asia Vicki-Ann Ware, Anthony Ware, Matthew Clarke and Grant Buchanan PART IV: CASE STUDIES 28. Religion, Development and Politics in Nigeria Insa Nolte 29. Religion and Development in Brazil, 1950–2010 Rowan Ireland 30. FBOs in Tanzania Michael Jennings 31. Partnership through Translation: A Donor’s Engagement with Religion Jane Anderson 32. The (In)visible Hand of Muhajirat. A Field Observation on Labour Migration, Social Change and Religion in the Vakhsh Valley, Tajikistan Bruno De Cordier 33. Where Shadows Fall Patchwork: Religion, Violence and Human Security in Afghanistan James Astley Connell 34. Australian Development FBOs and NGOs Lindsay Rae and Matthew Clarke Index

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which 'religion' and 'development' interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development. A Sarvodaya Shramadana work camp has proved to be the most effective means of destroying the inertia of any moribund village community and of evoking appreciation of its own inherent strength and directing it towards the objective of improving its own conditions.

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Stuart Bate

It is said that rapid economic growth promotes secularisation. South Africa recently joined the BRIC group of developing countries and signs are emerging of rapid economic growth in Africa. The article examines this new context to propose pastoral responses in theology and ministries. An examination of the Christian response to industrialisation leads to key themes of Catholic social teaching, Catholic Action movements and Christian schools. Based on these, examples of possible faith responses to secularism within new emerging economies are proposed. They include building on the Christian development history in Africa, promoting ethical leadership using the example of our religious formation programmes and utilising Christian tertiary education institutions in Africa in promoting faith-based development solutions. Keywords: Pastoral theology, development theology, inculturation; transcendent

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• > Journals
• > Horizons
• > Volume 16 Issue 2
• > The Relationship between Spirituality and Theology

Article contents

The relationship between spirituality and theology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

This essay considers the contribution which spirituality makes to theology and vice versa, using examples from Karl Rahner's work. His spirituality in the sense of lived religious experience is the point of departure for his theological anthropology. Conversely, his theology of devotion to the Sacred Heart critiques and informs a spirituality of the heart of Christ. After discussing the mutual benefits which spirituality and theology provide one another, this paper points out the contemporary relevance of a spirituality of Christ's heart.

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1 For example, see Hans Urs von Balthasar's review of Rahner's , Karl Geist in Welt, Zeitschrift fuer Katholische Theologie , 63 ( 1939 ), 378 ; Google Scholar Fischer , Klaus P. , Der Mensch als Geheimnis: Die Anthropoiogie Karl Rahners ( Freiburg : Herder , 1974 ); Google Scholar Neufeld , Karl H. S.J. , , “ Unter Bruedern: Zur Fruehgeschichte der Theologie Rahners aus der Zusammenarbeit mit H. Rahner ,” Wagnis Theologie: Erfahrungen mit der Theologie Karl Rahners , ed. Vorgrimler , Herbert ( Freiburg : Herder , 1979 ), pp. 347 –54; Google Scholar and Harvey D. Egan, “ ‘The Devout Christian of the Future Will … be a “Mystic”.’ Mysticism and Karl Rahner's Theology ” in Theology and Discovery; Essays in Honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. , ed. Kelly , William J. ( Milwaukee, WI : Marquette University Press , 1980 ), pp. 139 –58. Google Scholar

2 See Cousins , Ewert H. , “ Spirituality: A Resource for Theology ,” CTSA Proceedings 35 ( 1980 ), 124 –37; Google Scholar Lane , Dermot A. , The Experience of God: An Invitation to Do Theology ( New York : Paulist , 1981 ), esp. pp. 1 – 31 ; Google Scholar Leech , Kenneth , Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality ( San Francisco : Harper & Row , 1985 ); Google Scholar Louth , Andrew , Theology and Spirituality ( Oxford : SLG Press, Convent of the Incarnation , 1978 ); Google Scholar Principe , Walter , “ Toward Redefining Spirituality ,” Studies in Religion 12 ( 1983 ), 127 –41; CrossRef Google Scholar Shideler , Mary McDermott , “ The Mystic and the Theologian ,” Theology Today 32 ( 1975 ), 252 –62; CrossRef Google Scholar Schneiders , Sandra , “ Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners? ” Horizons 13 / 2 (Fall, 1986 ), 253 –74; CrossRef Google Scholar and Thompson , William M. , Fire & Light: The Saints and Theology. On Consulting the Saints, Mystics, and Martyrs in Theology ( New York : Paulist , 1987 ). Google Scholar

3 See Rahner , K. , “ Theology and Anthropology ,” Theological Investigations (= TI) , Vol. 9 , tr. Harrison , Graham ( New York : Crossroad , 1981 ), pp. 28 – 45 ; Google Scholar and Experieence of the Spirit: Source of Theology, TI 16. Cf. Carr , Anne , The Theological Method of Karl Rahner ( Missoula, MT : Scholars Press , 1977 ) Google Scholar , and “ Theology and Experience in the Thought of Karl Rahner ,” The Journal of Religion 53 ( 1973 ), 359 –76. CrossRef Google Scholar Cf. Egan , Harvey , “ Translator's Foreword ” in Rahner , , I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinhold Krauss ( New York : Crossroad , 1985 ), pp. 3 – 4 . Google Scholar

4 See Rahner , K. , Encounters with Silence , tr. Demske , James M. ( Westminster, MD : Newman , 1963 ); Google Scholar and “ Is Prayer Dialogue with God? ” Christian at the Crossroads ( New York : Seabury , 1975 ), pp. 62 – 69 . Google Scholar

5 See Rahner , K. , Introduction , TI 16 : x ; Google Scholar and “Reflections on the Experience of Grace,” TI 3: 86-90. See also King , Norman J. , Experiencing God All Ways and Every Day ( Minneapolis, MN : Winston , 1982 ). Google Scholar

6 See Julian of Norwich, Showings , tr. Colledge , Edmund and Walsh , James ( New York : Paulist , 1978 ), esp. pp. 256 –85. Google Scholar Cf. Egan , Harvey D. S.J. , , “ The Christian Mystics and Today's Theological Horizon ,” Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 17 ( 1982 ), 203 –16. Google Scholar

7 See Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life in Vol. 1 of Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila , tr. Kavanaugh , Kieran , and Rodriguez , Otilio ( Washington, DC : Institute of Carmelite Studies , 1976 ), pp. 53 – 365 , esp. ch. 22; Google Scholar and The Interior Castle in Vol. 2 of Collected Works , tr. Kavanaugh , and Rodriguez , ( Washington, DC : ICS , 1980 ), pp. 281 – 451 Google Scholar , esp. books 6 and 7. Cf. Thompson , , Fire and Light , pp. 143 –63. Google Scholar

8 See Lindbeck , George A. , The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age ( Philadelphia : Westminster , 1984 ), esp. pp. 30 – 45 Google Scholar , where he describes the former view as based on an “experiential-expressive model” and the latter view as based on a “cultural-linguistic alternative.” On the unity of religious experience, see Schuon , Frithjof , The Transcendent Unity of Religions , tr. Townsend , Peter ( New York : Harper and Row , 1975 ); Google Scholar and Smith , Huston , Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition ( New York : Harper and Row , 1976 ). Google Scholar

9 See. Rahner , K. , “ Anonymous Christians ,” TI 6 : 390 –98; Google Scholar “Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,” TI 12: 161-78; “ The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation ,” TI 16 ; 199 – 224 ; Google Scholar and Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity , tr. Dych , William V. ( New York : Seabury , 1978 ), pp. 295 –98. Google Scholar

10 See Lonergan , Bernard , Philosophy of God and Theology ( London : Darton, Longman & Todd , 1973 ), p. 50 ; Google Scholar and Method in Theology ( New York : Herder & Herder , 1973 ), esp. pp. 101 –24. Google Scholar PubMed

11 See Austin , J. L. , How to Do Things with Words ( Oxford : Clarendon , 1962 ), pp. 4 – 7 ; Google Scholar and Ricoeur , Paul , Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning ( Fort Worth : Texas Christian University Press , 1976 ), pp. 1 – 23 . Google Scholar

12 See Rahner , Karl , “ Priest and Poet ,” TI 3 : 294 – 317 ; Google Scholar “The Theology of the Symbol,” TI 4: 221-52; “Theology of Freedom,” TI 6; 178-96; Spiritual Exercises , tr. Baker , Kenneth ( New York : Herder , 1965 ), pp. 16–26, 31, 34, 39, and 142 ; Google Scholar and The Priesthood , tr. Quinn , Edward ( New York : Seabury , 1973 ), pp. 173 and 222 . Google Scholar Cf., Callahan , Annice , Karl Rahner's Spirituality of the Pierced Heart: A Reinterpretation of Devotion to the Sacred Heart ( Lanham, MD : University Press of America , 1985 ), pp. 35–37, 43–46, 90 – 96 . Google Scholar

13 See Rahner , K. , “ The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God ,” TI 3 : 35 – 46 ; Google Scholar “‘Behold This Heart! Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” TI 3: 321-30; “Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” TI 3: 331-52; and “ The Man with the Pierced Heart , Servants of the Lord , tr. Strachan , Richard ( New York : Herder and Herder , 1968 ), pp. 107 –19. Google Scholar Cf. Callahan, pp. 37, 46-48, 75-77, 90-100. See also Rahner , K. , “ E Latere Christi. Der Ursprung der Kirche als zweiter Eva aus der Seite Christi des zweiten Adam. Eine Untersuchung ueber den typologischen Sinn von Jo 19.34 ,” Diss., Innsbruck , 1936 . Google Scholar

14 I disagree with Gordon Kaufman who claims that we experience ourselves not God. See Kaufman , Gordon D. , Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective ( New York : Scribner's , 1968 ), esp. pp. 223 –34. Google Scholar

15 See Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in Cantico LXI , P.L. CLVIII, 761.; and Gertrude the Great, Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude ( London : Burns & Oates , 1870 ), esp. pp. 236, 257, 315, and 414 . Google Scholar Cf. Bynum , Caroline W. , Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1982 ), pp. 175 – 209 . Google Scholar See also Rahner , , “ E Latere ,” pp. 102 – 104 . Google Scholar Cf. Callahan, pp. 11-13.

16 See Rahner , , TI 3 : 352 Google Scholar , and “E Latere Christi.” Cf. Callahan, pp. 14-27.

17 See Rahner , K. , Visions and Prophecies , tr. Henkey , Charles and Strachan , Richard ( London : Burns & Oates , 1963 ), esp. pp. 53, 63, and 68 . Google Scholar Cf. Egan , Harvey D. S.J. , , What Are They Saying About Mysticism? ( New York : Paulist , 1982 ), pp. 9, 119 –20; Google Scholar and Christian Mysticism: The Future of a Tradition ( New York : Pueblo , 1984 ), pp. 101–06, 275–77, 303 –20. Google Scholar

18 For the use of the metaphor of earth-womb and woman as earth-womb, see Weber , Christin Lore , WomanChrist: A New Vision of Feminist Spirituality ( San Francisco : Harper & Row , 1987 ), pp. 8, 19, 48, 64–65, 67, 72–73, 142 . Google Scholar

19 See Hobday , Jose , “ Seeking a Moist Heart: Native American Ways for Helping the Spirit ” in Western Spirituality , ed. Fox , Matthew ( Santa Fe, NM : Bear & Co. , 1981 ), pp. 317 –29. Google Scholar

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• Volume 16, Issue 2
• Annice Callahan (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0360966900040500

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How Spirituality Can Benefit Your Health and Well-Being

Finding balance in and connection with something bigger

Spirituality vs. Religion

• How to Practice

Potential Pitfalls

What is spirituality.

Spirituality is a worldview that suggests a dimension to life beyond what we experience on the sensory and physical levels. In practice, this might entail religious or cultural practices and beliefs surrounding a higher being, connection with others and the world as a whole, and/or the pursuit of self-improvement.

Spirituality has been a source of comfort and relief for multitudes of people. Its meaning is highly individual but is often shared and expressed in group activities such as church services and holiday rituals. ​

Research has linked spirituality with well-being and health in the face of life challenges.

Signs of Spirituality

Spirituality is not a single path or belief system. There are many ways to experience spirituality and the benefits of a spiritual experience. How you define spirituality will vary. For some people, it's the belief in a higher power or a specific religious practice.

For others, it may involve experiencing a sense of connection to a higher state or a sense of inter-connectedness with the rest of humanity and nature. Some signs of spirituality can include:

• Asking deep questions about topics such as suffering or what happens after death
• Deepening connections with other people
• Experiencing compassion and empathy for others
• Experiencing feelings of interconnectedness
• Feelings of awe and wonder
• Seeking happiness beyond material possessions or other external rewards
• Seeking meaning and purpose
• Wanting to make the world a better place

Not everyone experiences or expresses spirituality in the same way. Some people may seek spiritual experiences in every aspect of their lives, while others may be more likely to have these feelings under specific conditions or in certain locations.

For example, some people may be more likely to have spiritual experiences in churches or other religious temples, while others might have these feelings when they're out enjoying nature.

Types of Spirituality

There are many different types of spirituality. Some examples of how people get in touch with their own spirituality include:

• Meditation or quiet time
• New age spirituality
• Service to their community
• Spending time in nature
• Spiritual retreats

Other people express their spirituality through religious traditions such as:

• Christianity

It is important to remember that there are many other spiritual traditions that exist throughout the world, including traditional African and Indigenous spiritual practices. Such spiritual practices can be particularly important to groups of people who have been subjected to the effects of colonialism.

Although spirituality and religion can overlap, here are some key points that differentiate the two.

Can be practiced individually

Doesn't have to adhere to a specific set of rules

Often focuses on a personal journey of discovering what is meaningful in life

Often practiced in a community

Usually based on a specific set of rules and customs

Often focuses on the belief in deities or gods, religious texts, and tradition

Uses of Spirituality

People often turn to spirituality to:

• Find purpose and meaning : Exploring spirituality can help people find answers to philosophical questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" and "What purpose does my life serve?"
• Cope with feelings of stress, depression, and anxiety : Spiritual experiences can be helpful when coping with the stresses of life. 
• Restore hope and optimism : Spirituality can help people develop a more hopeful outlook on life.
• Find a sense of community and support : Because spiritual traditions often involve organized religions or groups , becoming a part of such a group can serve as an important source of social support .

The Impact of Spirituality

While specific spiritual views are a matter of faith, research has demonstrated some of the benefits of spirituality and spiritual activity. The results may surprise no one who has found comfort in their religious or spiritual views, but they are definitely noteworthy in that they demonstrate in a scientific way that these activities do have benefits for many people.

The following are a few more of the many positive findings related to spirituality and health:

• Research has shown that religion and spirituality can help people cope with the effects of everyday stress. One study found that everyday spiritual experiences helped older adults better cope with negative feelings, and enhanced positive feelings.
• Research shows that older women are more grateful to God than older men, and they receive greater ​stress-buffering health effects due to this gratitude.
• According to research, those with an intrinsic religious orientation, regardless of gender, exhibited less physiological reactivity toward stress than those with an extrinsic religious orientation. Those who were intrinsically oriented dedicated their lives to God or a "higher power," while the extrinsically oriented ones used religion for external ends like making friends or increasing community social standing.

This, along with other research, demonstrates that there may be tangible and lasting benefits to maintaining involvement with a spiritual community. This involvement, along with the gratitude that can accompany spirituality, can be a buffer against stress and is linked to greater levels of physical health.

Dedication to God or a higher power translated into less stress reactivity, greater feelings of well-being, and ultimately even a decreased fear of death.

People who feel comfortable and comforted using spirituality as a coping mechanism for stress can rest assured that there's even more evidence that this is a good idea for them. Prayer works for young and old alike. Prayer and spirituality have been linked to:

• Better health
• Greater psychological well-being
• Less depression  
• Less hypertension
• Less stress, even during difficult times  
• More positive feelings
• Superior ability to handle stress

How to Practice Spirituality

Whether you are rediscovering a forgotten spiritual path, reinforcing your commitment to an already well-established one, or wanting to learn more about spirituality for beginners, there are countless ways to start exploring your spiritual side and help improve your well-being.

Spirituality is a very personal experience, and everyone’s spiritual path may be unique. Research shows, however, that some spiritual stress relief strategies have been helpful to many, regardless of faith. Some things you can do to start exploring spirituality include:

• Pay attention to how you are feeling : Part of embracing spirituality means also embracing what it means to be human, both the good and the bad. 
• Focus on others : Opening your heart, feeling empathy, and helping others are important aspects of spirituality.
• Meditate : Try spending 10 to 15 minutes each morning engaged in some form of meditation .
• Practice gratitude : Start a gratitude journal and record what you are grateful for each day. This can be a great reminder of what is most important to you and what brings you the greatest happiness.
• Try mindfulness : By becoming more mindful, you can become more aware and appreciative of the present. Mindfulness encourages you to be less judgmental (both of yourself and others) and focus more on the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or future.

Press Play for Advice on Being Human

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One potential pitfall of spirituality is a phenomenon known as spiritual bypassing . This involves a tendency to use spirituality as a way to avoid or sidestep problems, emotions, or conflicts.

For example, rather than apologizing for some type of emotional wound you have caused someone else, you might bypass the problem by simply excusing it and saying that "everything happens for a reason" or suggesting that the other person just needs to "focus on the positive."

The Takeaway

Research has noted a link between spirituality and resilience in the face of challenges. Whether this owes to a higher power, a sense of peace, community connection, or some other factor, spirituality may help foster your sense of well-being.

Akbari M, Hossaini SM. The relationship of spiritual health with quality of life, mental health, and burnout: The mediating role of emotional regulation . Iran J Psychiatry . 2018;13(1):22-31. PMID:29892314

Whitehead BR, Bergeman CS. Coping with daily stress: Differential role of spiritual experience on daily positive and negative affect .  J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci . 2012;67(4):456-459. doi:10.1093/geronb/gbr136

Manning LK. Spirituality as a lived experience: Exploring the essence of spirituality for women in late life . Int J Aging Hum Dev . 2012;75(2):95-113. doi:10.2190/AG.75.2.a

McMahon, BT, Biggs HC. Examining spirituality and intrinsic religious orientation as a means of coping with exam anxiety . Society, Health & Vulnerability . 2012;3(1). doi:10.3402/vgi.v3i0.14918

Johnson KA. Prayer: A helpful aid in recovery from depression . J Relig Health . 2018;57(6):2290-2300. doi:10.1007/s10943-018-0564-8

Wachholtz AB, Sambamthoori U. National trends in prayer use as a coping mechanism for depression: Changes from 2002 to 2007 . J Relig Health . 2013;52(4):1356-68. doi:10.1007/s10943-012-9649-y

Gonçalves JP, Lucchetti G, Menezes PR, Vallada H. Religious and spiritual interventions in mental health care: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials . Psychol Med . 2015;45(14):2937-49. doi:10.1017/S0033291715001166

Arrey AE, Bilsen J, Lacor P, Deschepper R. Spirituality/religiosity: A cultural and psychological resource among sub-Saharan African migrant women with HIV/AIDS in Belgium .  PLoS One . 2016;11(7):e0159488. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159488

Paul Victor CG, Treschuk JV. Critical literature review on the definition clarity of the concept of faith, religion, and spirituality . J Holist Nurs. 2019;38(1):107-113. doi:10.1177/0898010119895368

By Elizabeth Scott, PhD Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

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Questions about faith have inspired centuries of philosophical and theological reflection, particularly, though by no means exclusively, as faith is understood within the Christian branch of the Abrahamic religions. What is faith? What makes faith reasonable or unreasonable, valuable or disvaluable, morally permissible or impermissible, virtuous or vicious? How does faith relate to psychological states such as belief, desire, trust, and hope? How does faith relate to action? To what extent is faith under our voluntary control? Because answers to these further questions depend on what faith is, as well as on assumptions about relevant evaluative norms and the philosophical psychology and theory of action applicable to faith, this entry focusses on the nature of faith, while also touching upon implications of various models of faith for assessments of its reasonableness and value.

‘Faith’ is a broad term, appearing in locutions that point to a range of different phenomena. We speak of ‘having faith that you will succeed, despite setbacks,’ ‘having faith in democracy,’ ‘putting faith in God,’ ‘believing that God exists by faith,’ ‘being a person of faith,’ ‘professing and keeping the faith (or losing it),’ ‘keeping (or failing to keep) faith with someone’, and so on. At its most general ‘faith’ means much the same as ‘trust’. Uses of ‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ closely parallel ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ and these are often used interchangeably. Yet one of the striking and intriguing facts about theorizing in this area (the study of faith, faithfulness, and related phenomena), is that people have offered radically different accounts of what faith is—to such an extent that there remains disagreement even about the basic ontological category to which faith belongs. Is it a psychological state and, if so, is it cognitive, affective/evaluative, or perhaps some combination of both? Is it an act or disposition to act—or is there at least some sort of connection to action essential to faith and, if so, to what sorts of acts?

This entry will focus on religious faith as paradigmatic—or, rather, it will focus on the kind of faith exemplified in theistic faith (i.e., faith in God, faith that God exists, and commitment to a theistic interpretation of reality), while leaving open whether faith of that same general kind also belongs to other, non-theistic, religious contexts, or to contexts not usually thought of as religious at all. The question of faith outside of a theistic context, such as whether it is apt to speak of the faith of a humanist, or even an atheist, using the same general sense of ‘faith’ as applies to the theist case, is taken up in the final Section (11).

Philosophical reflection on theistic religious faith has produced markedly different accounts or models of its nature. This entry organizes discussion of accounts or models of faith around key components that feature in such accounts—with varying emphases, and with varying views about how these components relate to one another. These components are the cognitive , the affective , the evaluative , and the practical (volitional, actional and behavioural). Models of faith may also be usefully categorized according to further principles, including

• how the model relates faith as a state to the actional components associated with faith;
• whether the model takes the object of faith to be exclusively propositional (e.g., faith that such and such) or not (e.g., faith in persons or ideals);
• the type of epistemology with which the model is associated—whether it is broadly ‘internalist’ or ‘externalist’, ‘evidentialist’ or ‘fideist’;
• whether the model is necessarily restricted to theistic religious faith, or may extend beyond it.

The entry proceeds dialectically, with later sections presupposing the earlier discussion. The section headings are as follows:

1. Models of faith and their key components

2. the affective component of faith, 3. faith as knowledge, 4. faith and reason: the epistemology of faith, 5. faith as belief, 6. faith as an act of trust, 7. faith as doxastic venture, 8. venturing faith, without belief, 9. faith and hope, 10. faith as a virtue, 11. faith beyond (orthodox) theism, other internet resources, related entries.

While philosophical reflection on faith of the kind exemplified in religious contexts might ideally hope to yield an agreed definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions that articulate the nature of faith, the present discussion proceeds by identifying key components that recur in different accounts of religious faith. It also aims to identify a focal range of issues on which different stances are taken by different accounts. There is a plurality of existing philosophical understandings or models of faith of the religious kind. This discussion therefore aims to set out dialectically an organisation of this plurality, while also giving indications of the reasons there may be for preferring particular models over others. Since ‘religion’ itself may well be a ‘family resemblance’ universal, essentialism about faith of the religious kind might be misplaced. Nevertheless, the concept of faith as found in the Abrahamic, theist, religious traditions is widely regarded as unified enough for an inquiry into its nature to make sense, even if a successful real definition is too much to expect (this kind of faith might conceivably be a conceptual primitive, for example).

Note that some philosophers approach the target of religious faith by first classifying and analysing ordinary language uses of the term ‘faith’ and locutions in which that term occurs. See, for recent examples, Audi 2011 (Chapter 3, Section I), who identifies seven different kinds of faith, and Howard-Snyder (2013b), who attempts a general analysis of ‘propositional’ faith—i.e., faith that p is true, where p is a relevant proposition. The present discussion, however, deals directly with the target notion of the kind of faith exemplified in religious faith , assuming the background of a working grasp of the notion as deployed in religious forms of life, and specifically in those belonging to the theist traditions. Insights from the analysis of faith understood more broadly may, nevertheless, be important in constructing models of faith of the religious kind, as will emerge below in the discussion of religious faith as a kind of trust (Section 6).

The notion of religious faith as the possession of a whole people is familiar, and arguably theologically primary in the theist traditions. Philosophical accounts of theistic faith typically focus, however, on what it is for an individual person to ‘have faith’ or be ‘a person of faith’. An initial broad distinction is between thinking of faith just as a person’s state when that person ‘has faith’, and thinking of it as also involving a person’s act, action or activity . Faith may be a state one is in, or comes to be in; it may also essentially involve something one does. An adequate account of faith, perhaps, needs to encompass both. In the Christian context, faith is understood both as a gift of God and also as requiring a human response of assent and trust, so that their faith is something with respect to which people are both receptive and active.

There is, however, some tension in understanding faith both as a gift to be received and as essentially involving a venture to be willed and enacted. A philosophical account of faith may be expected to illuminate this apparent paradox. One principle for classifying models of faith is according to the extent to which they recognise an active component in faith itself, and the way they identify that active component and its relation to faith’s other components. It is helpful to consider the components of faith (variously recognised and emphasised in different models of faith) as falling into three broad categories: the affective , the cognitive and the practical . There are also evaluative components in faith—these may appear as implicated in the affective and/or the cognitive components, according to one’s preferred meta-theory of value.

One component of faith is a certain kind of affective psychological state—namely, having a feeling of assurance or trust. Some philosophers hold that faith is to be identified simply with such a state: see, for example, Clegg (1979, 229) who suggests that this may have been Wittgenstein’s understanding. Faith in this sense—as one’s overall ‘default’ affective attitude on life—provides a valuable foundation for flourishing: its loss is recognised as the psychic calamity of ‘losing one’s faith’. But if foundational existential assurance is to feature in a model of faith of the kind exemplified by theists, more needs to be added about the kind of assurance involved. The assurance of theistic faith is essentially a kind of confidence: it is essentially faith in God. In general, faith of the kind exemplified by theistic faith must have some intentional object . It may thus be argued that an adequate model of this kind of faith cannot reduce to something purely affective: some broadly cognitive component is also required. (For an account that takes faith to be fundamentally affective, while allowing that it might also involve cognitive aspects, see Kvanvig 2013.)

What kind of cognitive component belongs to faith, then? One possibility is that it is a kind of knowledge , but there is then a question about the kind of knowledge that it is: e.g., is it knowledge ‘by acquaintance’, or ‘propositional’ knowledge ‘by description’, or both? One type of model of faith as knowledge identifies faith as propositional knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God. A model of this type has received prominent recent defence in the work of Alvin Plantinga, who proposes an account which he regards as following in the tradition of the reformers, principally John Calvin (see Plantinga 2000, 168–86). Calvin defines faith thus: ‘a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit’ (John Calvin, Institutes III, ii, 7, 551, quoted by Plantinga (2000, 244)).

Appeal to a special cognitive faculty

‘Reformed’ epistemologists have appealed to an externalist epistemology in order to maintain that theistic belief may be justified even though its truth is no more than basically evident to the believer—that is, its truth is not rationally inferable from other, more basic, beliefs, but is found to be immediately evident in the believer’s experience (see Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000). On Plantinga’s version, (basic) theistic beliefs count as knowledge because they are produced by the operation of a special cognitive faculty whose functional design fits it for the purpose of generating true beliefs about God. Plantinga calls this the sensus divinitatis , using a term of Calvin’s. (For discussion of the extent to which Plantinga’s use of this term conforms to Calvin’s own usage see Jeffreys 1997 and Helm 1998.) This quasi-perceptual faculty meets functional criteria as a mechanism that, when functioning in the right conditions, confers ‘warrant’ (where warrant is whatever must be added to true belief to yield knowledge) and, granted theism’s truth, it probably yields ‘basic’ knowledge because God designs it just for that purpose. In defence of specifically Christian belief, Plantinga argues that the same warrant-conferring status belongs to the operation of the Holy Spirit in making the great truths of the Gospel directly known to the believer.

The welcome certainty of faith

This appeal to a God-given ‘higher’ cognitive faculty is found (in the early 12th Century) in al-Ghazâlî’s Deliverance from Error , where it provides the key to the ‘Sufi’ resolution of his religious crisis and his sceptical doubts about the deliverances of sense perception and unassisted human reason. Faith is thus understood as a kind of basic knowledge attended by a certainty that excludes doubt. But faith will not be exclusively cognitive, if, as in Calvin’s definition, faith-knowledge is not only ‘revealed to our minds’ but also ‘sealed upon our hearts’. For, on this model, faith will also have an affective/evaluative component that includes a welcoming of the knowledge received.

Practical aspects of faith on this model

This model of faith as a kind of knowledge, certain and welcome, exhibits faith as essentially something to be received, something delivered by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty. Nevertheless, the model may admit a practical component, since an active response is required for reception of the divine gift. Such a practical component is implied by the real possibility that faith may be resisted: indeed, Christians may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for persons of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. On this ‘special knowledge’ model of faith, however, this activity counts as ‘acting out’ one’s faith rather than as a part of faith itself. Persons of faith thus act ‘in’, ‘through’ or ‘by’ faith: but, on this model, their faith itself is the welcomed revealed knowledge on which they act.

Models of faith as knowledge may be thought lacking because they admit no actional component in faith itself. Faith seems essentially to involve some kind of active venture in commitment and trust, even if talk of a ‘leap of faith’ may not be wholly apt. Many have held that faith ventures beyond what is ordinarily known or justifiably held true, in the sense that faith involves accepting what cannot be established as true through the proper exercise of our naturally endowed human cognitive faculties. As Kant famously reports, in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason : ‘I have … found it necessary to deny knowledge , in order to make room for faith ’ (Kant 1787 [1933, 29]). Theist philosophers do, however, typically defend the claim that faith is not ‘contrary to reason’. On models of faith that take a cognitive component as central, and construe faith’s object as propositional, reasonable faith therefore seems subject to a general evidentialist principle—‘a wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence’, as Hume puts it (Hume 1748 [2007], “Of Miracles”, 80). And W. K. Clifford elevates evidentialism to the status of an absolute moral requirement, affirming that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ (Clifford 1877 [1999, 77]. Faith’s venturesomeness may thus seem in tension with its reasonableness, and models of faith differ in the way they negotiate this tension in response to evidentialist challenges. Another way to classify models of faith, then, is in terms of their associated epistemology—and, in particular, whether and according to what norms of ‘evidential support’, they accept that faith’s cognitive component needs to meet a requirement to be grounded on available evidence.

The Reformed epistemologist model of faith as ‘basic’ knowledge (outlined in Section 3) generates an epistemology under which, although ordinary cognitive faculties and sources of evidence do not yield firm and certain inferred knowledge of theistic truths, there is (if Christian theism is true) a ‘higher’ cognitive faculty that neatly makes up the deficit. This model seems thus to secure the rationality of faith: if faith consists in beliefs that have the status of knowledge, faith can hardly fail to be rational. And, once the deliverances of the special cognitive faculty are included amongst the believer’s basic experiential evidence, an evidential requirement on reasonable belief seems to be met. (Note that Plantinga originally expressed his defence of ‘properly basic’ theistic belief in terms of the rationality of believing in God ‘without any evidence or argument at all’ (Plantinga 1983, 17). He does respect an evidential requirement, however, holding that it may be fully met through what is basically, non-inferentially, evident in the believer’s experience. Hence Plantinga’s insistence that his Reformed epistemology is not fideistic (Plantinga 2000, 263).)

Reflective faith and the question of entitlement

It is not clear, however, whether Reformed epistemology’s model of faith can achieve all that is needed to show that theist faith is reasonable. From the perspective of reflective persons of faith (or would-be faith), the question of entitlement arises: are they rationally, epistemically—even, morally—entitled to adopt or continue in their faith? This question will be existentially important, since faith will not be of the kind exemplified by religious faith unless its commitments make a significant difference to how one lives one’s life. Reflective believers, who are aware of the many options for faith and the possibility of misguided and even harmful faith-commitments, will wish to be satisfied that they are justified in their faith. The theist traditions hold a deep fear of idolatry—of giving one’s ‘ultimate concern’ (Tillich 1957 [2001]) to an object unworthy of it. The desire to be assured of entitlement to faith is thus not merely externally imposed by commitment to philosophical critical values: it is a demand internal to the integrity of theistic faith itself. Arguably, believers must even take seriously the possibility that the God they have been worshipping is not, after all, the true God (Johnston 2009). But, for this concern to be met, there will need to be conditions sufficient for justified faith that are ‘internalist’—that is, conditions whose obtaining is, at least indirectly if not directly, accessible to believers themselves. And, as already noted, those conditions are widely assumed to include an evidentialist requirement that faith is justified only if the truth of its cognitive content is adequately supported by the available evidence.

The Reformed epistemologist model as leaving the question of entitlement unanswered

It may be argued, however, that, if the Reformed epistemologist’s model is correct, those who seek to meet an evidentialist requirement will be unable to satisfy themselves of their entitlement to their faith. Theistic truths may be directly revealed, and experienced as immediately evident, yet, on reflection, one may doubt whether such experiences are genuinely revelatory since competing ‘naturalist’ interpretations of those experiences seem available. Furthermore, there are rival sources yielding contrary claims that equally claim to be authentically revelatory. It may be true, as Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology maintains, that if God exists then certain basic theist beliefs meet externalist criteria for knowledge, even though the truth of the propositions concerned remains open to reflective ‘internalist’ doubt. On an externalist account, that is, one might lack independent evidence sufficient to confirm that one has knowledge that God exists while in fact possessing that very knowledge . One may thus refute an objector who claims that without adequate evidence one cannot possess knowledge. But this consideration is still insufficient to secure entitlement to theistic faith—if, as may be argued, that entitlement requires that one has evidence adequate to justify commitment to the truth that God exists. For, one has such evidence only conditionally on God’s existence —but it is precisely entitlement to believe that God exists that is at issue (Kenny 1992, 71; Bishop and Aijaz 2004). For a wider discussion of the possibility of religious knowledge that, inter alia , endorses the present point, see Zagzebski 2010.

If faith is not ‘firm and certain’ basic knowledge of theistic truths, then a model of faith as having a propositional object may still be retained by identifying faith with belief of relevant content—and the question whether a faith-belief may have sufficient justification to count (if true) as (non-basic) knowledge may remain open. To have theist faith might thus be identified with holding a belief with theological content—that God exists, is benevolent towards us, has a plan of salvation, etc.—where this belief is also held with sufficient firmness and conviction. Richard Swinburne labels this the ‘Thomist view’ of faith, and expresses it thus: ‘The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a God’ (Swinburne 2005, 138). (Aquinas’s own understanding of faith is more complex than this formulation suggests, however, as will be noted shortly.)

The rationality of faith on this model will rest on the rationality of the firmly held theological beliefs in which it consists. As Swinburne notes, if such beliefs are founded on evidence that renders their truth sufficiently more probable than not, then the beliefs concerned may amount to knowledge on a contemporary ‘justified true belief’ fallibilist epistemology, even though they fall short of knowledge on Aquinas’s own criteria, which require that what is known be ‘seen’ (i.e., fully and directly comprehended) ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 4 & 5 (Aquinas 1265–1273 [2006], 27)). In any case, the reasonableness of faith on this model of faith as (non-basic) theological belief depends on the beliefs concerned being adequately evidentially justified. The claim that this condition is satisfied is defended by John Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695 [1999]), and, in contemporary philosophy, by Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian approach to the epistemology of Christian belief (see, for example, Swinburne 2003).

Some argue, however, that the truth of theism is ‘evidentially ambiguous’—that is, that our total available evidence is equally viably interpreted from both a theist and a naturalist/atheist perspective (Hick 1966 and 1989; Davis 1978; Penelhum 1995; McKim 2001). This thesis of evidential ambiguity may be supported as the best explanation of the diversity of belief on religious matters, and/or of the persistence of the debate about theism, with philosophers of equal acumen and integrity engaged on either side. Or the ambiguity may be considered systematic—for example, on the grounds that both natural theological and natural atheological arguments fail because they are deeply circular, resting on implicit assumptions acceptable only to those already thinking within the relevant perspective. (In relation to Swinburne’s Bayesian natural theology, in particular, this objection surfaces in criticism of assumptions about how to set the prior probabilities implicated in calculations of, for example, theism’s probability on the evidence of the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe’s basic physical constants, or of the probability, on all our evidence, of the truth of the Resurrection.) If the ambiguity thesis is correct, then—assuming evidentialism—firmly held theistic belief will fail to be reasonable.

On this model of faith as non-basic belief, all that characterizes faith apart from its theological content is the firmness or conviction with which faith-propositions are held true. Firm belief in the truth of a scientific theoretical proposition, for example, fails to count as faith only through lacking the right kind of content. This model therefore shares with the Reformed epistemologist model in taking its theological content as essential to what makes theistic faith faith , and so rejects the suggestion that faith of the same sort as found in the theist religious traditions might also be found elsewhere.

Furthermore, in taking faith to consist in non-basic belief that theological propositions are true, this model invites the assumption that theological convictions belong in the same category of factual claims as scientific theoretical hypotheses with which they accordingly compete. That assumption will lead those who think that theological claims are not reasonably accepted on the evidence to regard faith as worthless and intellectually dishonourable—at best, ‘a degenerating research programme’ (Lakatos 1970). (On this negative assessment of faith’s evidential support, persons of faith come perilously close to the schoolboy’s definition mentioned by William James: ‘Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true’ (James 1896 [1956, 29]). Or, if persons who have theistic faith readily abandon theological explanations whenever competing scientific ones succeed, their God gets reduced to ‘the God of the gaps’.) These misgivings about the model of faith as firmly held factual theological belief dissolve, of course, if success attends the project of showing that particular theological claims count as factual hypotheses well supported by the total available evidence. Those who doubt that this condition is or can be met may, however, look towards a model of faith that understands faith’s cognitive content as playing some other role than that of an explanatory hypothesis of the same kind as a scientific explanatory hypothesis.

Aquinas’s account of faith

Though firmly held theological belief is central to it, Aquinas’s understanding of faith is more complicated and nuanced than the view that faith is ‘the theoretical conviction that God exists’. Aquinas holds that faith is ‘midway between knowledge and opinion’ ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 2 (Aquinas [2006], 11)). Faith resembles knowledge, Aquinas thinks, in so far as faith carries conviction. But that conviction is not well described as ‘theoretical’, if that description suggests that faith has a solely propositional object. For Aquinas, faith denotes the believer’s fundamental orientation towards the divine. So ‘from the perspective of the reality believed in’, Aquinas says, ‘the object of faith is something non-composite ’ (hence, definitely not propositional)—namely God himself. Nevertheless, grasping the truth of propositions is essential to faith, because ‘ from the perspective of the one believing … the object of faith is something composite in the form of a proposition’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 1, 2 (Aquinas [2006], 11 & 13), our emphases).

A further problem with describing as Thomist a model of faith simply as firm belief that certain theological propositions are true is that Aquinas takes as central an act of ‘inner assent’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 59–65)). This is problematic because, (i) in its dominant contemporary technical usage belief is taken to be a mental (intentional) state —a propositional attitude, namely, the attitude towards the relevant proposition that it is true; (ii) belief in this contemporary sense is widely agreed not to be under volitional control—not directly, anyway; yet (iii) Aquinas holds that the assent given in faith is under the control of the will. Aquinas need not, however, be construed as accepting ‘believing at will’, since assent may be construed as an act that has to be elicited yet terminates a process that is subject to the will—a process of inquiry, deliberation or pondering that involves mental actions, or, in the case of theist faith, a process of divine grace that can proceed only if it is not blocked by the will.

Most importantly, however, Aquinas says that assent is given to the propositional articles of faith because their truth is revealed by God , and on the authority of the putative source of this revelation. Terence Penelhum puts it like this: ‘Thomas tells us that although what one assents to in faith includes many items not ostensibly about God himself, one assents to them, in faith, because they are revealed by God … It is because they come from him and because they lead to him that the will disposes the intellect to accept them’ (Penelhum 1989, 122: see Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 1, 1 & 2 (Aquinas [2006], 5–15)). So, Aquinas’s model of faith is of believing (assenting to) propositional truth-claims on the basis of testimony carrying divine authority . John Locke follows the same model: ‘Faith … is the assent to any proposition … upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication’ (Locke 1698 [1924, 355]; compare also Alston 1996, 15).

The unanswered question of entitlement—again

Theist faith as assent to truths on the basis of an authoritative source of divine revelation is possible, though, only for those who already believe that God exists and is revealed through the relevant sources. Might such faith, then, have to rest on a prior faith—faith that God exists and that this is God’s messenger or vehicle of communication? Those foundational claims, it might be maintained, are held true on the grounds of adequately supporting evidence, such as putatively provided by arguments of natural theology and the claimed evidence for miraculous endorsement of a prophet’s authority. Theist faith might then have a purely rational foundation. But this could hardly be so for every person of faith, since not everyone who believes will have access to the relevant evidence or be able to assess it properly. Besides, and more importantly, although Aquinas allows that rational assessment of the available evidence may lead a person to faith, he does not think that such an assessment could ever elicit assent itself—only demonstration could achieve that and so high a level of proof is not here available (see Aquinas [2006], footnote 2b, 58–9). Aquinas’s view is thus that all believers stand in need of God’s grace: ‘the assent of faith, which is its principal act … has as its cause God, moving us inwardly through grace’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae 6, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 167)). It follows, then, that, on Aquinas’s view, believing that God exists and is revealed in specific ways is itself a matter of faith, and not a purely rationally evidentially secured prolegomenon to it.

Aquinas’s model of faith thus shares with the Reformed epistemologist model the problem that it leaves unanswered the reflective believer’s concern about entitlement. Attempting to settle that concern by meeting the evidential requirement leads to circularity: theological truths are to be accepted on divine authority, yet the truth that there is such an authority (historically mediated as the relevant tradition maintains) is amongst those very truths that are to be accepted on divine authority—indeed, it is the crucial one. As Descartes puts it in the Dedication to his Meditations , ‘It is of course quite true that we must believe in the existence of God because it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture, and conversely, that we must believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God. … But this argument cannot be put to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular’ (Descartes 1641 [Cottingham et al. 1984, 3]). Thus, although they differ on the question whether the firm beliefs of faith count as knowledge, both Aquinas and Calvin understand faith as essentially involving accepting the truth of propositions as revealed through willingly receiving God’s gracious gift of that very revelation. The question remains how accepting this gift could be epistemically rational. The externalist account of how Christian beliefs may have epistemic worth proposed in Plantinga’s model of faith (named ‘the A/C’ model because its sources are supposedly found in Aquinas as well as Calvin) offers some help with the required explanation, but (as noted in the final paragraph of Section 4 above) may arguably not by itself be sufficient.

Revelation—and its philosophical critique

The reasonableness of belief that God exists is a focal issue in the Philosophy of Religion. Theist traditions typically, or some would say essentially, make a foundational claim about an authoritative source, or sources, of revealed truth. What is salient includes belief or some related sort of affirmation, not just that God exists but associated content such as that this God exists, the God who is revealed thus and so (in great historical acts, in prophets, in scriptures, in wisdom handed down, etc.). The reasonableness of theism is therefore as much a matter of the reasonableness of an epistemology of revelation as it is of a metaphysics of perfect being. The question of how God may be expected to make himself known has gained prominence through recent discussion of the argument for atheism from ‘divine hiddenness’ (Schellenberg 1993; Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002). That argument holds that a loving God would make his existence clear to the non-resistant—but this claim is open to question. Perhaps God provides only ‘secret’ evidence of his existence, purposely overturning the expectations of our ‘cognitive idolatry’ in order to transform our egocentric self-reliance (Moser 2008); besides, there may be significant constraints logically inherent in the very possibility of unambiguous divine revelation to finite minds (King 2008).

Similarly, accounts of theistic faith will be open to critique when they make assumptions about the mechanisms of revelation. In particular, the model of faith as assent to propositions as revealed holds that, since God’s grace is required for that assent, when grace is effective the whole ‘package deal’ of propositional revealed truth is accepted. This yields the notion of ‘ the Faith’, as the body of theological truths to be accepted by ‘the faithful’, and it becomes a sign of resistance to divine grace to ‘pick and choose’ only some truths, as heretics do (Greek: hairesis , choice; see Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 5, 3 (Aquinas [2006], 157–61)). For heresy to be judged, however, some human authority must assume it possesses the full doctrinal revelation, with God’s grace operating without resistance in its own case. Whether that assumption can ever be sufficiently well founded to justify condemning and purging others is an important question, whose neglect may be seriously harmful, as we are reminded by the fact that the phrase for ‘act of faith’ in Portuguese— auto-da-fé —came to mean the public burning of a heretic.

But the deeper assumption made by this model of faith as non-basic (justified) belief (as, too, by the model of it as basic knowledge yielded by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty) is that God’s self-revelation is primarily the revelation of the truth of propositions articulated in human language (compare Swinburne 1992). Alternative understandings of revelation are available, however. In particular, it may be held that it is primarily the divine itself that is revealed—the reality, not merely a representation of it. (See Lebens 2023 for discussion of faith as knowledge by acquaintance with God from a Jewish perspective). Propositional articulations of what is revealed may still be essential, but they need to be accepted as at a remove from the object of revelation itself, and therefore as limited. The development of propositional articulations expressing the nature and will of the self-revealing God—the doctrines of ‘the Faith’—will, of course, be understood as a process under providential grace. It is often assumed that that process can achieve ‘closure’ in a completed set of infallibly known creedal propositions. But this assumption about how divine inspiration operates may be contested, both on the theological grounds that it reflects the all-too-human desire to gain control over God’s self-revelation (to ‘pin God down once and for all’), and on the wider epistemological grounds that any attempt to grasp independent reality in human language will be in principle limited and fallible, subject to revision in the light of future experience.

Not all models of faith, however, identify it as primarily a matter of knowing or believing a proposition or a set of them, even with the addition of some affective or evaluative component. What is most central to theistic faith may seem better expressed as believing in God, rather than as believing that God exists. The Christian Nicene creed begins ‘Credo in unum Deum …’ and it is arguable that in this context ‘belief in’ is neither merely an idiomatic variant on, nor reducible to, ‘belief that’ (Price 1965). It may thus be held that theists’ acceptance of propositional truths as divinely revealed rests on believing in God—and it is this ‘believing in’, or ‘having faith in’, which is, fundamentally, the nature of faith. Noting that, while faith is held to be a virtue, believing as such is not, Wilfred Cantwell Smith argues that ‘faith is not belief’, ‘but something of a quite different order’ (Smith 1979, 128), requiring ‘assent’ ‘in the dynamic and personal sense of rallying to [what one takes to be the truth] with delight and engagement’ (142). Arguably, to put or to maintain faith in God involves a readiness to act, perhaps by relying on God in relevant ways and/or grounded in a practical commitment. Our considerations now shift, then, from propositional-attitude-focussed models of faith to those focussed on action, or what J. L. Schellenberg calls ‘operational’ models (2005, 126).

Judeo-Christian scripture envisions humans as actively engaged in a covenantal relationship with God. Their ongoing participation in, and commitment to, such a relationship paradigmatically involves both faith in God and faithfulness to God (McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2022a and 2023a; Pace and McKaughan 2020). The kind of faith of which Christian faith is a paradigm case, then, may be understood as ‘action-centred commitment’ (McKaughan 2016, 78), e.g., to the Christian ‘way’. Arguably, faith understood as a combination of affective and cognitive elements would miss its essential active component. We now turn, then, to consider a fiducial model—a model of faith as trust, understood not simply as an affective state but as an action .

On a fiducial model, having faith in God is making a practical commitment —the kind involved in trusting God , or, trusting in God. (The root meaning of the Greek pistis , ‘faith’, is ‘trust’ (see Morgan 2015).) On such a model, faith’s active, practical component takes central place, though a cognitive component may be presupposed by it. Swinburne calls it the ‘Lutheran’ model, and defines it thus: ‘the person of faith does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about him)—he trusts Him and commits himself to Him’ (2005, 142). Yet, as noted earlier, Aquinas too takes the ultimate object of faith to be God, ‘the first reality’, and, furthermore, understands ‘formed’ faith as trusting commitment to God, motivated by, and directed towards, love of God as one’s true end (see Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 4, 3; Aquinas [2006], 123–7). It is true that Aquinas allows that the devils have faith in a certain sense, but this ‘faith’ amounts only to their belief that what the Church teaches is the truth, arrived at not by grace but ‘forced from them’ reluctantly by ‘the acumen of their natural intelligence’ ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 5, 2; Aquinas [2006], 155 & 157). Aquinas’s account of ‘saving’ faith is thus also a fiducial model.

The venture of trust

As noted at the outset, there is a usage of ‘faith’ for which ‘having/placing faith in’ is (near enough) synonymous with ‘trusting’ or ‘trusting in’. (For discussion of how faith relates to a range of contemporary theories of trust, see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2022b.) If, moreover, faith of the religious kind is itself a type of trust, then we may expect our understanding of religious faith to profit from an analysis of trust in general. It is therefore worth considering what follows about the nature of faith of the sort exemplified in theistic faith from holding it to be a kind of active trust.

Conceptually fundamental to trust is the notion of a person (or persons)—the truster—trusting in some agent or agency—the trustee— for some (assumedly) favourable outcome (though what the trustee is trusted for is often only implicit in the context). Trust involves a venture ; so too—it is widely agreed—does faith. So, if faith is trust, the venture of faith might be presumed to be the type of venture implicated in trust. A venture is an action that places the agent and outcomes of concern to the agent significantly beyond the agent’s own control. Trust implies venture. When we trust we commit ourselves to another’s control, accepting—and, when necessary, co-operating as ‘patient’—with the decisions of the trustee. Venturing in trust is usually assumed to be essentially risky, making oneself vulnerable to adverse outcomes or betrayal. Swinburne makes the point this way: ‘To trust someone is to act on the assumption that she will do for you what she knows that you want or need, when the evidence gives some reason for supposing that she may not and where there will be bad consequences if the assumption is false’ (2005, 143). Annette Baier makes no requirement for evidence that the trustee may prove untrustworthy, but nevertheless takes trust to involve ‘accepted vulnerability to another’s possible but not expected ill will (or lack of good will) toward one’ (Baier 1986, 235, our emphasis). Accordingly, it seems sensible to hold that one should trust only with good reason. But if, as is plausible, good reason to trust requires sufficient evidence of the trustee’s trustworthiness, reasonable trust appears both to have its venturesomeness diminished and, at the same time, to become more difficult to achieve than we normally suppose. For we often lack adequate—or even, any—evidence of a trustee’s trustworthiness in advance of our venture, yet in many such cases we suppose that our trust is reasonable (see, for example, Adams 1987). But, if adequate evidence of trustworthiness is not required for reasonable trust, how is reasonable trust different from ‘blind’ trust?

The answer seems clear: reasonable trust is practically rational trust. The question of when one may rationally trust another may thus be resolved by a decision-theoretic calculation, factoring in the extent to which one’s evidence supports the potential trustee’s trustworthiness and the utilities of the possible outcomes, given one’s intended aims. The exercise of practical reasoning does include mental acts which are epistemically evaluable, however. When one takes it to be true in practical reasoning that someone will prove trustworthy, that mental act may be more or less epistemically rational: it would break the evidentialist norm to employ in a decision-theoretic calculation a credence that does not match one’s available evidence. In many situations, it will be practically rational, given one’s intentions, to trust another person only if one believes, or, at least, believes with high probability, that the person will prove trustworthy. In such situations it is also often the case, as already noted, that we don’t have adequate evidence in advance that this person will be trustworthy in this particular respect. Yet, affording high credence to a person’s trustworthiness may still be epistemically rational given wider available evidence of, for example, the person’s past friendliness and trustworthiness in other matters, or, if the person is a stranger, of our shared social experience that trusting others generally elicits a trustworthy response. Nevertheless, it can still be rational— practically rational, that is—to trust another when we don’t have adequate evidence that they will prove trustworthy. In a life-threatening situation, for example, it may be rational to trust unlikely rescuers if they are the only ones available. Or, when we have wider aims, it may be practically rational to trust those without a record of trustworthiness, as with ‘educative’ and ‘therapeutic’ trust where people are trusted for the sake of their development or rehabilitation as trustworthy persons. Being in established relationships of friendship with others, too, can also require commitment to continue to trust them even in the face of evidence that, otherwise, would make it reasonable to believe them unworthy of trust.

On models that take faith of the theist kind to consist fundamentally in an act of trust, the analogy with interpersonal trust is suggestive. When one person trusts another there seems typically (though not uniformly) to be a doxastic aspect (the truster’s belief that the trustee is trustworthy). But what’s essential is the fiducial aspect, which consists in an active commitment or ‘entrusting’ to the other. Paul Helm proposes that theist faith similarly has importantly distinct doxastic and fiducial aspects: in addition to belief about God’s existence and trustworthiness for salvation held with a degree of strength proportional to the believer’s evidence, persons of faith must also entrust themselves to the one on whom they rely (Helm 2000). While it is widely agreed that theist faith must have a cognitive aspect, some philosophers hold that this need not be doxastic (as we shall see in Section 8).

There are significant differences, however, between the trusting involved in theistic faith and that involved in interpersonal trust. For one thing, trusting would seem not to risk any possibility of disappointment if God really is the trustee. Given the existence of the God of unchanging love, one trusts in ultimately perfect safety. But the venture of actually entrusting oneself to God seems to begin with the challenge of being able to believe or accept that, indeed, there is such a God. While some affirm that this claim is a matter of basic knowledge, and some that there is sufficient evidence to justify it, others, as already noted, hold that everyone has to confront the evidential ambiguity of foundational theistic claims. For those who reject the model of theist faith as basic knowledge and also think that the question of God’s existence cannot be settled intellectually on the basis of the available evidence, the venture involved in trusting in God (if such there be) may seem to include a doxastic venture: those who trust already venture beyond the available evidence, in their very believing or accepting that God exists and may be relied on for salvation. Trusting in God seems to presuppose, in other words, trusting that God exists. But, if so, the question becomes pressing whether, and under what conditions, one may be entitled to such an evidence-transcending venture in practical commitment to a particular view of ultimate reality and its implications for how we should live.

Theological non-realism

One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a non-realist analysis of theological claims. Trusting God will then not entail any commitment to reality’s being a certain way. Rather, on arguably the most sophisticated kind of non-realist view, theological beliefs arise because living ‘trustingly’ comes to be expressed and reinforced through a culturally constructed fiction about God and his great saving acts. This existential confidence may then be described, using the language of the fiction, as ‘trusting God’ (Cupitt 1980, Geering 1994). On such a non-realist account, the model of faith as trust brackets the cognitive component of faith, and risks becoming, in effect, a model of faith as purely a certain kind of affective state. But, in any case, non-realist models will be rejected by those who take faith to have a cognitive component that functions as a grasping—or would-be grasping—of how things really are.

Defending doxastic venture by analogy with interpersonal trust?

Assuming, then, that theist faith does include (under realist assumptions) a venture in practical commitment to truth-claims about ultimate reality, the justifiability of such a venture might yet be thought defensible by analogy with interpersonal situations where practical commitment seems justifiably to be made beyond one’s evidence to the claim that a person will prove trustworthy in some relevant respect. Reflecting on that proposal discloses further points of disanalogy, however. In cases of interpersonal trust, a venture is often needed in initially taking the trustee to be trustworthy, but evidence will inevitably later emerge which will either confirm or disconfirm the truth of that claim, and trust may, and rationally should, be withdrawn if the news is bad. But if—as we are here assuming—one ventures beyond evidential support in taking it to be true in practical reasoning that God exists and may be trusted for salvation, this may be a venture that is not confined to initial commitment but rather persists in needing to be made. This will be the case on accounts of the evidential ambiguity of theism that take the ambiguity to hold in principle, ruling out any possibility of evidential disambiguation. Those accounts may grant, of course, that continuing to journey in theistic faith may psychologically reinforce one’s commitment, providing subjective confirmation that the theist view of reality is correct. Yet these reinforcing experiences, which often involve faith renewed in the face of apparent failures of divine love, do not possess the uncontroversial status of evidence that independently and inter-subjectively confirms the initial venture.

Doxastic venture without doxastic voluntarism

Many dismiss the idea that one may venture in one’s very believing that God exists as committing a category error: ventures are voluntary, but propositional belief is not directly under voluntary control. Trusting God, however, entails practical commitment to the truth of theological faith-propositions , and commitment to the truth of a proposition in one’s practical reasoning may be under direct voluntary control.

It is one thing to be in the mental state of holding that the proposition that p is true; it is another to take it to be true that p in one’s practical reasoning (although these typically go together, since to hold that p is true is to be disposed to take it to be true that p in practical reasoning whenever the question whether p becomes salient). Practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth therefore could be a venture: there is no category error in allowing this possibility. Doxastic venturing—venturing in believing—is thus not a matter of willing oneself to believe without adequate evidential support; rather it is a matter of taking an already held belief to be true in one’s practical reasoning even though (as one may oneself recognise) its truth lacks such support.

The psychological possibility of doxastic venture

Some philosophers have argued, however, that one cannot (in full reflective awareness, anyway) believe that p while accepting that one has insufficient evidence for p ’s truth (Adler 2002). The counterclaim that this is possible is defended by William James, in his controversial 1896 lecture, ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896 [1956]). James agrees that belief cannot be directly willed and must be otherwise causally evoked (he later came to wish that he had used ‘The Right to Believe’ as his lecture’s title). James observes, however, that many beliefs have causes that do not constitute or imply an evidential grounding of their truth. James labels such causes ‘passional’—again, a potentially misleading term, since its intended referents include much more than emotional causes of belief. In particular, beliefs may be caused by ‘the circumpressure of one’s caste or set,’ of which one’s inherited religious tradition is a paradigm case (James 1896 [1956, 9]). James is thus able to explain the psychological possibility of doxastic venture: one already has a ‘passionally’ caused belief, which one then takes to be true in practical reasoning despite its lack of adequate evidential grounding (compare Creel 1994, who similarly describes ‘faith’ as a ‘non-evidential doxastic passion’).

Note that a doxastic venture model of theistic faith reconciles faith as gift with faith’s active components: taking a faith-proposition to be true in practical reasoning is a basic (mental) action (which leads on to further actions involved in trusting God and seeking to do God’s will); the gift provides the motivational resources for this basic action, namely a firm belief in the truth of the faith-proposition, despite its lack of adequate evidential support. (In the next section, the possibility is considered that the gift of these motivational resources might be effective yet not amount to actual belief.) It is also worth noting that those who find the focus on the individual something of a deficiency in analytical accounts of faith (Eklund 2015) may perceive in James’ account some acknowledgment of the social aspect of faith. Arguably, the standard ‘passional’ or ‘non-evidential’ cause of religious belief is cultural immersion within an historical faith-tradition. The motivational resources for faith-commitment may thus be an essentially social possession.

Examples of doxastic venture models

On the doxastic venture model, faith involves full practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth, despite the recognition that this is not ‘objectively’ justified on the evidence. Kierkegaard’s definition of faith as ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard 1846 [1968, 180]) is an example of a doxastic venture model. So too is Paul Tillich’s account of faith as ‘the state of being ultimately concerned’, since the claim of the object of one’s ultimate concern to ‘promise total fulfilment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name’ cannot in principle be established on the basis of the evidence (Tillich 1957 [2001, 1 and 21]).

Aquinas’s model of faith, though widely thought of as conforming to an evidential requirement on belief, may arguably be open to interpretation as a doxastic venture model. As noted in Section 5, Aquinas holds that the available evidence, though it supports the truth of foundational faith-propositions, does not provide what Aquinas counts as sufficient (i.e., demonstrative) support to justify inner assent (in addition to references to the Summa Theologiae given previously, see 2a2ae. 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 63); and compare also Penelhum 1989, 120). Now, whether practical commitment to the truth of a given faith-proposition does or does not venture beyond adequate evidential support will be relative to assumptions about (a) where the level of evidential support required for ‘adequacy’ should be set, and (b) just how firm and decisive propositional faith-commitment needs to be. On some such assumptions, for example those made by Bayesians, the support provided by the evidence Aquinas adduces—or, by a suitable contemporary upgrading of that evidence such as that provided in the works of Richard Swinburne—may be considered enough to make reasonable a sufficiently high degree of belief (or credence) in the truth of theistic faith-propositions so that believers need not venture beyond the support of their evidence. Interpreting Aquinas’s model of faith as conforming to evidentialism may thus be viable. Nevertheless, Aquinas’s own assumptions on these matters may leave him closer to Kierkegaard and Tillich than is commonly thought (consider Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 4, 1 and, once again, 2a2ae 6, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 117–9 & 167)).

The special role of faith-propositions

Bayesians might argue that there is no occasion for faith as doxastic venture since, once practical commitment to the truth of propositions is recognised as a matter of degree, whatever the state of the available evidence relating to a given proposition, there will always (given initial credences) be a rational credence properly associated with that evidence, and hence there are no possible circumstances where ‘the evidence does not decide’, so that an evidentialist requirement can indeed apply universally. Note, however, Lara Buchak’s (2012, 2018) discussion of ways in which Bayesians might understand faith as going beyond the evidence, and her own proposal that faith-ventures essentially include an additional practical commitment, which may be rational under certain conditions, not to inquire further into evidence relevant to the truth of the propositions concerned for the sole purpose of deciding what to do. (For critical discussion of this kind of restriction on inquiry in connection with faith commitments, see Dormandy 2018 and Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022a. Katherine Dormandy has recently proposed a positive defence of evidentialism in considering the question of what makes it good to form positive beliefs about those you have faith in, including God (Dormandy 2022).)

If the domain of faith is, as Stephen Evans puts it, ‘the assumptions, convictions and attitudes which the believer brings to the evidence for and against religious truth’ (Evans 1985, 178), and faith’s cognitive component offers a ‘total interpretation’ of the world of our experience (Hick 1966, 154), then (foundational) faith-propositions function as ‘highest-order framing principles’ which necessarily cannot have their truth settled by appeal to the force of a body of independent evidence (Bishop 2007a, 139–44). Taking such a faith-proposition to be true, then, is not something that comes in degrees: either one ‘buys into’ the overall worldview (foundational) faith-propositions propose, or one does not. Such a choice is existentially important, and settling it raises anxiety about exercising a responsibility that cannot—without ‘bad faith’—be transferred onto the relatively impersonal function of one’s reason, since a venture beyond any inter-subjectively rational evidential confirmation is required. The doxastic venture model may thus be regarded as capturing the spiritual challenge of faith more satisfactorily than do models that conform to evidentialism. This is because, on the doxastic venture model, faith involves a deeper surrender of self-reliant control, not only in trusting God, but in accepting at the level of practical commitment that there is a God—indeed, this God—who is to be trusted.

Doxastic venture models of faith and epistemic concern

Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support—and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment.

A possible view of theistic faith-commitment is that it is wholly independent of the epistemic concern that cares about evidential support. On this view, faith reveals its authenticity most clearly when it takes faith-propositions to be true contrary to the weight of the evidence. This view is widely described as ‘fideist’, but ought more fairly to be called arational fideism, or, where commitment contrary to the evidence is positively favoured, irrational or counter-rational fideism. Despite its popular attribution both to the church father Tertullian and to ‘the father of existentialism’, Kierkegaard, counter-rational fideism does not seem to have been espoused by any significant theist philosophers (passages in Tertullian and Kierkegaard that appear to endorse this position may be interpreted as emphasizing that Christian faith requires accepting, not logical contradiction, but ‘contradiction’ of our ‘natural’ expectations, wholly overturned in the revelation that the power of divine love is triumphant in the Crucified One).

Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith thus implies a moderate version of fideism, for which epistemic concern is not overridden and for which, therefore, it is a constraint on faith-commitment that it not accept what is known, or justifiably believed on the evidence, to be false. Rather, faith commits itself only beyond , and not against, the evidence—and it does so out of epistemic concern to grasp truth on matters of vital existential importance. The thought that one may be entitled to commit to an existentially momentous truth-claim in principle undecidable on the evidence when forced to decide either to do so or not is what motivates William James’s ‘justification of faith’ in ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896 [1956]). If such faith is to be justified, its cognitive content will (on realist assumptions) have to cohere with our best evidence-based theories about the real world. Faith may extend our scientific grasp of the real, but may not counter it. Whether the desire to grasp more truth about the real than science can supply is a noble aspiration or a dangerous delusion is at the heart of the debate about entitlement to faith on this moderate fideist doxastic venture model.

A discussion of the debate between the moderate, Jamesian, fideist and the evidentialist is beyond this entry’s scope. Still, it is worth remarking that those who think that faith understood as doxastic venture may be justified as reasonable face the challenge of providing the tools for weeding out intuitively unreasonable forms of faith. On the other side, those evidentialists who reject doxastic venture as always impermissible have to consider whether taking a stance on the nature of reality beyond anything science can even in principle confirm may not, in the end, be unavoidable, and potentially implicated in the commitments required for science itself (see Bishop 2007a, Chapters 8 and 9; Bishop 2023). For a useful recent collection of articles on the wider theme of the relation of religious faith to intellectual virtue, see Callahan and O’Connor 2014.

Some accounts allow that faith centrally involves practical commitment venturing beyond evidential support, yet do not require (or, even, permit) that the venturer actually believes the faith-proposition assumed to be true. Such accounts may be described as proposing a ‘non-doxastic’ venture model of faith. F. R. Tennant holds a view of this kind: he takes faith to be the adoption of a line of conduct not warranted by present facts, that involves experimenting with the possible or ideal, venturing into the unknown and taking the risk of disappointment and defeat. Faith is not an attempt to will something into existence but rather treating hoped for and unseen things as if they were real and then acting accordingly (Tennant 1943 [1989, 104]). Swinburne refers to this as the ‘pragmatist’ model of faith (Swinburne 2005, 147–8; Swinburne 2001, 211; compare also Golding 1990, 2003 and McKaughan 2016). The origins of Swinburne’s pragmatist model are to be found in a much earlier paper, Swinburne 1969.

William Alston (1996) suggests that faith may involve an active ‘acceptance’ rather than purely receptive belief. A clearly non-doxastic venture model results if acceptance is understood on Jonathan Cohen’s account under which to accept that p is ‘to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p —i.e. of including that proposition … among one’s premisses for deciding what to do or think in a particular context, whether or not one feels it to be true that p ’ (Cohen 1992, 4, our emphasis). The firmness of faith-commitment is then just the firmness of one’s ‘ resolve to use [faith-claims] as a basis for one’s thought, attitude and behaviour’ (Alston 1996, 17): there is no firm assurance of their truth . Decisive commitment in the absence of such assurance may nevertheless be possible, motivated (as Swinburne suggested in the first edition of his Faith and Reason ) by the evaluative belief that ‘unless [faith-propositions are true], that which is most worthwhile is not to be had’ (Swinburne, 1981, 117). A faith venture that lacks belief in the faith-proposition to which commitment is made need not, and probably could not, lack cognitive components altogether, as this suggestion of Swinburne’s indicates.

Andrei Buckareff (2005) and J. L. Schellenberg (2005, 138–9) propose non-doxastic (or, ‘sub-doxastic’) venture models of propositional faith, with Schellenberg emphasising the positive evaluation that persons of faith make of the truth-claim to which they commit themselves. In response to Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013a) Schellenberg allows that faith may in some instances involve belief while still maintaining that ‘non-doxastic religious faith … will turn out to be a particularly important way of having religious faith as we head into the future’ (2013, 262). Bishop (2005), in response to Buckareff, also agrees that authentic faith need not always be a specifically doxastic venture. There may, then, be an emerging consensus amongst proponents of venture models that faith, at its core, consists in suitably motivated persistent practical commitment ‘beyond the evidence’ to the positively evaluated truth of foundational faith-claims which may, but need not, actually be believed to be true.

Robert Audi (2011) has also defended a non-doxastic account of faith, contrasting ‘fiducial faith’ and ‘doxastic faith’, and arguing that authentic religious faith need only amount to the former. Audi’s account is not strictly a ‘venture’ model, however, since he does not take commitment beyond the support of adequate evidence to be essential. Audi’s account suggests that religious faith is sui generis , but capable of being understood through its relations with other psychological states and actions, such as beliefs, evaluations and practical commitments. Rational assessment of religious faith, Audi thinks, must avoid treating it as implying belief, while recognising that greater confidence attaches to it than to religious hope. For another version of a non-doxastic account of faith, as a person’s ‘affective orientation or stance’, see Jonathan Kvanvig (2013, 2018). The question whether faith entails belief (even if it may not consist purely in beliefs) remains a lively focus of debate. For defence of the view that faith entails belief, see Malcolm and Scott 2016 and Mugg 2021; for criticism see Howard-Snyder 2019.

Some philosophers have suggested that the epistemological challenges faced by accounts of faith as involving belief beyond the evidence may be avoided by construing theist commitment as hope. Theist hope seems not to be mere tenacity (‘clinging to one’s hopes’) (Taylor 1961), but a more complex attitude. James Muyskens suggests, for example, that one who hopes ‘keep[s] his life open or fluid with respect to [a faith-proposition] p —where (a) neither p nor not- p is certain for him, (b) he wants p and (c) he sees p as constructively connected with his own well-being and/or concept of himself as a person’ (1979, 35). Muyskens contrasts hope with faith (understood as belief), arguing that a religion of hope is both epistemically and religiously superior to a religion of faith. But faith is not generally understood as competing with hope (Creel 1993), and some philosophers identify faith with hoping that the claims of faith are true (Pojman 1986; 2003). Hope as such is an attitude rather than an active commitment, and, as Audi observes, it contrasts with the attitude of faith at least in this respect, namely, that surprise makes little sense as a response to discovering that the object of one’s faith is indeed the case, whereas there need be nothing inappropriate in surprise at the fulfilment of one’s hopes (see Audi 2011, 74).

A more adequate model of faith as hope, then, may rather take faith to be acting in, or from, hope. Such a model then comes close to a non-doxastic venture model of faith, differing only in so far as acting from hope that God exists differs from taking this claim to be true (albeit without belief) in one’s practical reasoning, but this difference may be undetectable at the level of behavioral outcomes (see McKaughan 2013). A model of faith as acting in hope shares with the doxastic and non-doxastic venture models in rejecting the view that faith requires cognitive certainty. But one can act in hope with firmness and resilience, given a strong affective/evaluative stance, even if one lacks belief that one’s hopes will be fulfilled. Hoping that p , however, does not involve taking a stand on its being true that p , which is widely thought to be essential to faith.

The ‘venture’ models of faith (with or without belief) and the model of faith as a venture in hope all fit the view that faith is consistent with doubt, and, indeed, impossible without doubt of some kind, though they allow that persons who have faith may give firm and sustained commitment to the truth of faith-propositions in practice (for discussion of different kinds of doubt and their compatibility or incompatibility with faith and belief see Howard-Snyder 2013b, 359). The ‘certainty’ of faith on these models is more a matter of the certainty that persons of faith find themselves conferring on the foundational claims of their faith, rather than a matter of discovering in themselves a certain knowledge or intellectual conviction of the truth of these claims. It is possible, then, on these accounts of faith, to be a committed person of faith and also an ‘agnostic’ in Thomas Huxley’s original sense of someone who does not claim as knowledge the commitments he or she nevertheless makes as a foundational practical orientation to reality. (For discussion of the compatibility of Muslim faith and doubt, see Aijaz 2023.)

Faith is traditionally regarded as one of the ‘theological’ virtues. If a virtue is a ‘disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more basic goods’, then theistic faith qualifies since it is ‘a responsiveness to practical hope and truth’, provided theistic faith-claims are indeed true (Chappell 1996, 27). Faith will not, however, be a virtue as such , if it is accepted that faith can be misplaced or, even, ‘demonic’, directed upon a ‘false ultimate’ (Tillich 1957 [2001, 21]). To be virtuous, faith must be faith in a worthy object: it is faith in God that is the theological virtue. More generally, faith is virtuous only when it is faith to which one is entitled. An account of the conditions under which faith is permissible is thus the key to an ethics of faith.

On models of faith as a (special) kind of knowledge, or as firmly held belief, it may seem puzzling how faith could be a virtue—unless some implicit practical component emerges when such models are further explicated, or, alternatively, a case may be made for the claim that what is involuntary may nevertheless be praiseworthy, with theist faith as a case in point (Adams 1987). (For discussion of how faith might be voluntary, even if faith entails belief, or indeed is a type of belief, and belief is not under our direct voluntary control, see Rettler 2018.) Furthermore, as already suggested (Sections 4 & 5 above), models of faith as knowledge or belief fail to provide non-circular conditions sufficient for entitlement, unless the truth of faith-propositions is established by independent argument and evidence. If faith is understood as, or as essentially including, beliefs held on insufficient evidence, it is also hard to understand why Abrahamic religious traditions have valued it so highly, let alone why God might be thought to make salvation contingent on such belief (Kvanvig 2018, 106; McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2021).

Fiducial models of faith seem more attuned to exhibiting faith as a virtue, though a defence of the trustworthiness of the one who is trusted for salvation may be required. Doxastic and non-doxastic venture models of faith can vindicate faith as a virtue, provided they provide robust entitlement conditions, to ensure that not just any ‘leap of faith’ is permissible. The Jamesian account already mentioned (Section 7) aims to meet this need. James’s own view of what suffices to justify a faith-venture arguably needs an ethical supplement: both the non-evidential motivation for the venture and its content must be morally acceptable (Bishop 2007a, 163–6).

If faith of the religious kind is to count as valuable and/or virtuous, it seems there must be a suitable degree of resilience in the commitment made (see Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022b for arguments that faith requires resilience; for discussion of the value and potential virtuousness or viciousness of resilient faith see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023a; on the rationality of resilient faith see Buchak 2017, Jackson 2021, and McKaughan 2016). Persons of religious faith and faithfulness both put their faith in and are faith ful to the object of their commitment, though the salient kind of faithfulness may be a matter of the continual renewal of faith rather than of maintaining it unchanged (Pace and McKaughan 2020). (See Audi 2014 for a discussion of faith and faithfulness in relation to virtue. Audi defends faithfulness as, like courage, an ‘adjunctive’ virtue, and argues that being ‘a person of faith’ counts as a ‘virtue of personality’.)

Faith is only one of the Christian theological virtues, of course, the others being hope and charity (or love, agapē ): St. Paul famously affirms that the greatest of these is love (I Cor. 13:13). The question thus arises how these three virtues are related. One suggestion is that faith is taking it to be true that there are grounds for the hope that love is supreme—not simply in the sense that love constitutes the ideal of the supreme good, but in the sense that living in accordance with this ideal constitutes an ultimate salvation, fulfilment or consummation that is, in reality, victorious over all that may undermine it (in a word, over evil). The supremacy of love is linked to the supremacy of the divine itself, since love is the essential nature of the divine. What is hoped for, and what faith assures us is properly hoped for, is a sharing in the divine itself, loving as God loves (see Brian Davies on Aquinas, 2002). On this understanding, reducing faith to a kind of hope (Section 9 above) would eradicate an important relation between the two—namely that people of faith take reality to be such that their hope (for salvation, the triumph of the good) is well founded, and not merely an attractive fantasy or inspiring ideal. (See Jeffrey 2017 for discussion of the moral permissibility of faith, particularly in connection with hope.)

What is the potential scope of faith? On some models, the kind of faith exemplified by theistic faith is found only there. On models which take faith to consist in knowledge or belief, faith is intrinsically linked to theological content—indeed, in the case of Christian faith, to orthodox Christian theological content, specifiable as one unified set of doctrines conveyed to receptive human minds by the operation of divine grace. The venture models, however, allow for the possibility that authentic faith may be variously realised, and be directed upon different, and mutually incompatible, intentional objects. This pluralism is an important feature of accounts of faith in the American pragmatist tradition. John Dewey strongly rejected the notion of faith as a special kind of knowledge (Dewey 1934, 20), as did William James, whose ‘justification of faith’ rests on a permissibility thesis, under which varied and conflicting faith-commitments may equally have a place in the ‘intellectual republic’ (James 1896 [1956, 30]). Charles S. Peirce, another influential American pragmatist, arguably held a non-doxastic view of faith (Pope 2018).

Both Dewey and James defend models of faith with a view to advancing the idea that authentic religious faith may be found outside what is generally supposed to be theological orthodoxy. Furthermore, they suggest that ‘un-orthodox’ faith may be more authentic than ‘orthodox’ faith. ‘The faith that is religious’, says Dewey, ‘[I should describe as] the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices’ (1934, 33). And James: ‘Religion says essentially two things: First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. ... [and] the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (James 1896 [1956, 25–6]). While some of what Dewey and James say about justifiable faith may appear non-realist, in fact they both preserve the idea that religious faith aspires to grasp, beyond the evidence, vital truth about reality. For example, Dewey holds that religious belief grounds hope because it takes something to be true about the real world ‘which carr[ies] one through periods of darkness and despair to such an extent that they lose their usual depressive character’ (1934, 14–5).

A general—i.e., non-theologically specific—account of the religious kind of faith may have potential as a tool for criticising specific philosophical formulations of the content of religious faith. The conditions for permissible faith-venture may exclude faith in God under certain inadequate conceptions of who or what God is. Arguably, the ‘personal omniGod’ of much contemporary philosophy of religion is just such an inadequate conception (Bishop 2007b). An understanding of what faith is, then, may motivate radical explorations into the concept of God as held in the theistic traditions (Bishop 1998; Johnston 2009; Bishop and Perszyk 2014, 2023).

Can there be faith of the same general kind as found in theistic religious faith yet without adherence to any theistic tradition? Those who agree with F. R. Tennant that ‘faith is an outcome of the inborn propensity to self-conservation and self-betterment which is a part of human nature, and is no more a miraculously superadded endowment than is sensation or understanding’ (1943 [1989, 111]) will consider that this must be a possibility. Tennant himself suggests that ‘much of the belief which underlies knowledge’—and he has scientific knowledge in mind—‘is the outcome of faith which ventures beyond the apprehension and treatment of data to supposition, imagination and creation of ideal objects, and justifies its audacity and irrationality (in accounting them to be also real) by practical actualization’ (1943 [1989, 100]). Faith in this sense, however, may not seem quite on a par with faith of the religious kind. True, scientists must act as if their ‘ideal objects’ are real in putting their theories to the empirical test; but they will ‘account them to be also real’ only when these tests do provide confirmation in accordance with the applicable inter-subjective norms.

If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent inter-subjective evidential support to the truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit themselves (with sufficient steadfastness) to such a Weltanschauung or worldview will be people of faith. Faith of this kind may be religious, and it may be religious without being theistic, of course, as in classical Buddhism or Taoism. Some have argued that faith is a human universal: Cantwell Smith, for example, describes it as ‘a planetary human characteristic [involving the] capacity to perceive, to symbolize, and live loyally and richly in terms of, a transcendent dimension to [human] life’ (1979, 140–141). There may also, arguably, be non-religious faith: for example, ‘scientific atheists’ or ‘naturalists’ may be making a faith-venture when they take there to be no more to reality than is in principle discoverable by the natural sciences. The suggestion that atheism rests on a faith-venture will, however, be resisted by those who maintain ‘the presumption of atheism’ (Flew, 1976): if atheism is rationally the default position, then adopting it requires no venture.

An atheist’s faith-venture may, in any case, seem oddly so described on the grounds that it provides no basis for practical hope or trust. Providing such a basis may plausibly be thought necessary for faith—the truth to which the venturer commits must be existentially important in this way. (Note James’s requirement that faith-commitment is permissible only for resolving a ‘genuine option’, where a genuine option has inter alia to be ‘momentous’, that is, existentially significant and pressing (James 1896 [1956, 3–4]).) Truth-claims accepted by faith of the religious kind seem essentially to be ‘saving’ truths—solutions to deep problems about the human situation. And there may thus be arguments as to which religious tradition offers the best solutions to human problems (see, for example, Yandell 1990, 1999). J. L. Schellenberg (2009) argues that the only kind of religious faith that could be justified (if any is) is a sceptical ‘ultimism’, in which one ‘assents’ to and treats as real an imaginatively grasped conception of a metaphysically, axiologically and soteriologically ultimate reality.

Some may nevertheless argue that an existentially vital faith that grounds hope can belong within a wholly secular context—that is, without counting in any recognisable sense as ‘religious’. Cantwell Smith claims, for example, that ‘the Graeco-Roman heritage … and its fecundating role in Western life [can] be seen as one of the major spiritual traditions of our world’ (1979, 139). Annette Baier suggests that ‘the secular equivalent of faith in God, which we need in morality as well as in science or knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and its evolving procedures – in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes’ (Baier 1980, 133). More broadly, some maintain that a meaningful spirituality is consistent with a non-religious atheist naturalism, and include something akin to faith as essential to spirituality. For example, Robert Solomon takes spirituality to mean ‘the grand and thoughtful passions of life’, and holds that ‘a life lived in accordance with those passions’ entails choosing to see the world as ‘benign and life [as] meaningful’, with the tragic not to be denied but accepted (Solomon 2002, 6 & 51). (For further discussion of faith in secular contexts, see Preston-Roedder 2018, Tsai 2017, and Ichikawa 2020; for special journal issues addressing a variety of issues in the philosophy of faith in both religious and secular contexts, see Rice et al. 2017; Malcolm 2023; McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023b.)

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Aquinas, Thomas | belief | Christian theology, philosophy and | fideism | James, William | Kierkegaard, Søren | pragmatic arguments and belief in God | religion: and science | religion: epistemology of | religion: philosophy of | trust

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sophie Milne and Selwyn Fraser for research assistance on this entry, and Imran Aijaz, Robert Audi, Thomas Harvey, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Katherine Munn Dormandy, Glen Pettigrove and John Schellenberg for helpful comments on drafts.

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Article contents

Religion, culture, and communication.

• Stephen M. Croucher , Stephen M. Croucher School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University
• Cheng Zeng , Cheng Zeng Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• Diyako Rahmani Diyako Rahmani Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• , and  Mélodine Sommier Mélodine Sommier School of History, Culture, and Communication, Eramus University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.166
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are.

It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

• communication
• intercultural communication

Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Compiling an entry on the relationships among religion, culture, and communication is not an easy task. There is not one accepted definition for any of these three terms, and research suggests that the connections among these concepts are complex, to say the least. Thus, this article attempts to synthesize the various approaches to these three terms and integrate them. In such an endeavor, it is impossible to discuss all philosophical and paradigmatic debates or include all disciplines.

It is difficult to define religion from one perspective and with one encompassing definition. “Religion” is often defined as the belief in or the worship of a god or gods. Geertz ( 1973 ) defined a religion as

(1) a system which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (p. 90)

It is essential to recognize that religion cannot be understood apart from the world in which it takes place (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). To better understand how religion relates to and affects culture and communication, we should first explore key definitions, philosophies, and perspectives that have informed how we currently look at religion. In particular, the influences of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are discussed to further understand the complexity of religion.

Karl Marx ( 1818–1883 ) saw religion as descriptive and evaluative. First, from a descriptive point of view, Marx believed that social and economic situations shape how we form and regard religions and what is religious. For Marx, the fact that people tend to turn to religion more when they are facing economic hardships or that the same religious denomination is practiced differently in different communities would seem perfectly logical. Second, Marx saw religion as a form of alienation (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). For Marx, the notion that the Catholic Church, for example, had the ability or right to excommunicate an individual, and thus essentially exclude them from the spiritual community, was a classic example of exploitation and domination. Such alienation and exploitation was later echoed in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844–1900 ), who viewed organized religion as society and culture controlling man (Nietzsche, 1996 ).

Building on Marxist thinking, Weber ( 1864–1920 ) stressed the multicausality of religion. Weber ( 1963 ) emphasized three arguments regarding religion and society: (1) how a religion relates to a society is contingent (it varies); (2) the relationship between religion and society can only be examined in its cultural and historical context; and (3) the relationship between society and religion is slowly eroding. Weber’s arguments can be applied to Catholicism in Europe. Until the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries, Catholicism was the dominant religious ideology on the European continent. However, since the Reformation, Europe has increasingly become more Protestant and less Catholic. To fully grasp why many Europeans gravitate toward Protestantism and not Catholicism, we must consider the historical and cultural reasons: the Reformation, economics, immigration, politics, etc., that have all led to the majority of Europeans identifying as Protestant (Davie, 2008 ). Finally, even though the majority of Europeans identify as Protestant, secularism (separation of church and state) is becoming more prominent in Europe. In nations like France, laws are in place that officially separate the church and state, while in Northern Europe, church attendance is low, and many Europeans who identify as Protestant have very low religiosity (strength of religious devotion), focusing instead on being secularly religious individuals. From a Weberian point of view, the links among religion, history, and culture in Europe explain the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and now the rise of secularism.

Emile Durkheim ( 1858–1917 ) focused more on how religion performs a necessary function; it brings people and society together. Durkheim ( 1976 ) thus defined a religion as

a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (p. 47)

From this perspective, religion and culture are inseparable, as beliefs and practices are uniquely cultural. For example, religious rituals (one type of practice) unite believers in a religion and separate nonbelievers. The act of communion, or the sharing of the Eucharist by partaking in consecrated bread and wine, is practiced by most Christian denominations. However, the frequency of communion differs extensively, and the ritual is practiced differently based on historical and theological differences among denominations.

Georg Simmel ( 1858–1918 ) focused more on the fluidity and permanence of religion and religious life. Simmel ( 1950 ) believed that religious and cultural beliefs develop from one another. Moreover, he asserted that religiosity is an essential element to understand when examining religious institutions and religion. While individuals may claim to be part of a religious group, Simmel asserted that it was important to consider just how religious the individuals were. In much of Europe, religiosity is low: Germany 34%, Sweden 19%, Denmark 42%, the United Kingdom 30%, the Czech Republic 23%, and The Netherlands 26%, while religiosity is relatively higher in the United States (56%), which is now considered the most religious industrialized nation in the world ( Telegraph Online , 2015 ). The decline of religiosity in parts of Europe and its rise in the U.S. is linked to various cultural, historical, and communicative developments that will be further discussed.

Combining Simmel’s ( 1950 ) notion of religion with Geertz’s ( 1973 ) concept of religion and a more basic definition (belief in or the worship of a god or gods through rituals), it is clear that the relationship between religion and culture is integral and symbiotic. As Clark and Hoover ( 1997 ) noted, “culture and religion are inseparable” and “religion is an important consideration in theories of culture and society” (p. 17).

Outside of the Western/Christian perception of religion, Buddhist scholars such as Nagarajuna present a relativist framework to understand concepts like time and causality. This framework is distinct from the more Western way of thinking, in that notions of present, past, and future are perceived to be chronologically distorted, and the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical (Wimal, 2007 ). Nagarajuna’s philosophy provides Buddhism with a relativist, non-solid dependent, and non-static understanding of reality (Kohl, 2007 ). Mulla Sadra’s philosophy explored the metaphysical relationship between the created universe and its singular creator. In his philosophy, existence takes precedence over essence, and any existing object reflects a part of the creator. Therefore, every devoted person is obliged to know themselves as the first step to knowing the creator, which is the ultimate reason for existence. This Eastern perception of religion is similar to that of Nagarajuna and Buddhism, as they both include the paradoxical elements that are not easily explained by the rationality of Western philosophy. For example, the god, as Mulla Sadra defines it, is beyond definition, description, and delamination, yet it is absolutely simple and unique (Burrell, 2013 ).

How researchers define and study culture varies extensively. For example, Hall ( 1989 ) defined culture as “a series of situational models for behavior and thought” (p. 13). Geertz ( 1973 ), building on the work of Kluckhohn ( 1949 ), defined culture in terms of 11 different aspects:

(1) the total way of life of a people; (2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; (3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; (4) an abstraction from behavior; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a storehouse of pooled learning; (7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; (8) learned behavior; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; (11) a precipitate of history. (Geertz, 1973 , p. 5)

Research on culture is divided between an essentialist camp and a constructivist camp. The essentialist view regards culture as a concrete and fixed system of symbols and meanings (Holiday, 1999 ). An essentialist approach is most prevalent in linguistic studies, in which national culture is closely linked to national language. Regarding culture as a fluid concept, constructionist views of culture focus on how it is performed and negotiated by individuals (Piller, 2011 ). In this sense, “culture” is a verb rather than a noun. In principle, a non-essentialist approach rejects predefined national cultures and uses culture as a tool to interpret social behavior in certain contexts.

Different approaches to culture influence significantly how it is incorporated into communication studies. Cultural communication views communication as a resource for individuals to produce and regulate culture (Philipsen, 2002 ). Constructivists tend to perceive culture as a part of the communication process (Applegate & Sypher, 1988 ). Cross-cultural communication typically uses culture as a national boundary. Hofstede ( 1991 ) is probably the most popular scholar in this line of research. Culture is thus treated as a theoretical construct to explain communication variations across cultures. This is also evident in intercultural communication studies, which focus on misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.

Religion, Community, and Culture

There is an interplay among religion, community, and culture. Community is essentially formed by a group of people who share common activities or beliefs based on their mutual affect, loyalty, and personal concerns. Participation in religious institutions is one of the most dominant community engagements worldwide. Religious institutions are widely known for creating a sense of community by offering various material and social supports for individual followers. In addition, the role that religious organizations play in communal conflicts is also crucial. As religion deals with the ultimate matters of life, the differences among different religious beliefs are virtually impossible to settle. Although a direct causal relationship between religion and violence is not well supported, religion is, nevertheless, commonly accepted as a potential escalating factor in conflicts. Currently, religious conflicts are on the rise, and they are typically more violent, long-lasting, and difficult to resolve. In such cases, local religious organizations, places facilitating collective actions in the community, are extremely vital, as they can either preach peace or stir up hatred and violence. The peace impact of local religious institutions has been largely witnessed in India and Indonesia where conflicts are solved at the local level before developing into communal violence (De Juan, Pierskalla, & Vüllers, 2015 ).

While religion affects cultures (Beckford & Demerath, 2007 ), it itself is also affected by culture, as religion is an essential layer of culture. For example, the growth of individualism in the latter half of the 20th century has been coincident with the decline in the authority of Judeo-Christian institutions and the emergence of “parachurches” and more personal forms of prayer (Hoover & Lundby, 1997 ). However, this decline in the authority of the religious institutions in modernized society has not reduced the important role of religion and spirituality as one of the main sources of calm when facing painful experiences such as death, suffering, and loss.

When cultural specifications, such as individualism and collectivism, have been attributed to religion, the proposed definitions and functions of religion overlap with definitions of culture. For example, researchers often combine religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.) with cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1991 ) like individualism/collectivism to understand and compare cultural differences. Such combinations for comparison and analytical purposes demonstrate how religion and religious identification in particular are often relegated to a micro-level variable, when in fact the true relationship between an individual’s religion and culture is inseparable.

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

Religion as a part of culture has been linked to numerous communication traits and behaviors. Specifically, religion has been linked with media use and preferences (e.g., Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ), health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), interpersonal communication (e.g., Croucher, Faulkner, Oommen, & Long, 2012b ), organizational behaviors (e.g., Garner & Wargo, 2009 ), and intercultural communication traits and behaviors (e.g., Croucher, Braziunaite, & Oommen, 2012a ). In media and religion scholarship, researchers have shown how religion as a cultural variable has powerful effects on media use, preferences, and gratifications. The research linking media and religion is vast (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ). This body of research has shown how “religious worldviews are created and sustained in ongoing social processes in which information is shared” (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 , pp. 7–8). For example, religious Christians are more likely to read newspapers, while religious individuals are less likely to have a favorable opinion of the internet (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), and religious individuals (who typically attend religious services and are thus integrated into a religious community) are more likely to read media produced by the religious community (Davie, 2008 ).

Research into health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues is also robust. Research shows how religion, specifically religiosity, promotes healthier living and better decision-making regarding health and wellbeing (Harris & Worley, 2012 ). For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our health.

Research specifically examining the links between religion and interpersonal communication is not as vast as the research into media, health, and religion. However, this slowly growing body of research has explored areas such as rituals, self-disclosure (Croucher et al., 2012b ), and family dynamics (Davie, 2008 ), to name a few.

The role of religion in organizations is well studied. Overall, researchers have shown how religious identification and religiosity influence an individual’s organizational behavior. For example, research has shown that an individual’s religious identification affects levels of organizational dissent (Croucher et al., 2012a ). Garner and Wargo ( 2009 ) further showed that organizational dissent functions differently in churches than in nonreligious organizations. Kennedy and Lawton ( 1998 ) explored the relationships between religious beliefs and perceptions about business/corporate ethics and found that individuals with stronger religious beliefs have stricter ethical beliefs.

Researchers are increasingly looking at the relationships between religion and intercultural communication. Researchers have explored how religion affects numerous communication traits and behaviors and have shown how religious communities perceive and enact religious beliefs. Antony ( 2010 ), for example, analyzed the bindi in India and how the interplay between religion and culture affects people’s acceptance of it. Karniel and Lavie-Dinur ( 2011 ) showed how religion and culture influence how Palestinian Arabs are represented on Israeli television. Collectively, the intercultural work examining religion demonstrates the increasing importance of the intersection between religion and culture in communication studies.

Collectively, communication studies discourse about religion has focused on how religion is an integral part of an individual’s culture. Croucher et al. ( 2016 ), in a content analysis of communication journal coverage of religion and spirituality from 2002 to 2012 , argued that the discourse largely focuses on religion as a cultural variable by identifying religious groups as variables for comparative analysis, exploring “religious” or “spiritual” as adjectives to describe entities (religious organizations), and analyzing the relationships between religious groups in different contexts. Croucher and Harris ( 2012 ) asserted that the discourse about religion, culture, and communication is still in its infancy, though it continues to grow at a steady pace.

Future Lines of Inquiry

Research into the links among religion, culture, and communication has shown the vast complexities of these terms. With this in mind, there are various directions for future research/exploration that researchers could take to expand and benefit our practical understanding of these concepts and how they relate to one another. Work should continue to define these terms with a particular emphasis on mediation, closely consider these terms in a global context, focus on how intergroup dynamics influence this relationship, and expand research into non-Christian religious cultures.

Additional definitional work still needs to be done to clarify exactly what is meant by “religion,” “culture,” and “communication.” Our understanding of these terms and relationships can be further enhanced by analyzing how forms of mass communication mediate each other. Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ) asserted that there should be a shift from media to mediations as multiple opposing forces meet in communication. He defined mediation as “the articulations between communication practices and social movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality of cultural matrices” (p. 187). Religions have relied on mediations through various media to communicate their messages (oral stories, print media, radio, television, internet, etc.). These media share religious messages, shape the messages and religious communities, and are constantly changing. What we find is that, as media sophistication develops, a culture’s understandings of mediated messages changes (Martin-Barbero, 1993 ). Thus, the very meanings of religion, culture, and communication are transitioning as societies morph into more digitally mediated societies. Research should continue to explore the effects of digital mediation on our conceptualizations of religion, culture, and communication.

Closely linked to mediation is the need to continue extending our focus on the influence of globalization on religion, culture, and communication. It is essential to study the relationships among culture, religion, and communication in the context of globalization. In addition to trading goods and services, people are increasingly sharing ideas, values, and beliefs in the modern world. Thus, globalization not only leads to technological and socioeconomic changes, but also shapes individuals’ ways of communicating and their perceptions and beliefs about religion and culture. While religion represents an old way of life, globalization challenges traditional meaning systems and is often perceived as a threat to religion. For instance, Marx and Weber both asserted that modernization was incompatible with tradition. But, in contrast, globalization could facilitate religious freedom by spreading the idea of freedom worldwide. Thus, future work needs to consider the influence of globalization to fully grasp the interrelationships among religion, culture, and communication in the world.

A review of the present definitions of religion in communication research reveals that communication scholars approach religion as a holistic, total, and unique institution or notion, studied from the viewpoint of different communication fields such as health, intercultural, interpersonal, organizational communication, and so on. However, this approach to communication undermines the function of a religion as a culture and also does not consider the possible differences between religious cultures. For example, religious cultures differ in their levels of individualism and collectivism. There are also differences in how religious cultures interact to compete for more followers and territory (Klock, Novoa, & Mogaddam, 2010 ). Thus, localization is one area of further research for religion communication studies. This line of study best fits in the domain of intergroup communication. Such an approach will provide researchers with the opportunity to think about the roles that interreligious communication can play in areas such as peacemaking processes (Klock et al., 2010 ).

Academic discourse about religion has focused largely on Christian denominations. In a content analysis of communication journal discourse on religion and spirituality, Croucher et al. ( 2016 ) found that the terms “Christian” or “Christianity” appeared in 9.56% of all articles, and combined with other Christian denominations (Catholicism, Evangelism, Baptist, Protestantism, and Mormonism, for example), appeared in 18.41% of all articles. Other religious cultures (denominations) made up a relatively small part of the overall academic discourse: Islam appeared in 6.8%, Judaism in 4.27%, and Hinduism in only 0.96%. Despite the presence of various faiths in the data, the dominance of Christianity and its various denominations is incontestable. Having religions unevenly represented in the academic discourse is problematic. This highly unbalanced representation presents a biased picture of religious practices. It also represents one faith as being the dominant faith and others as being minority religions in all contexts.

Ultimately, the present overview, with its focus on religion, culture, and communication points to the undeniable connections among these concepts. Religion and culture are essential elements of humanity, and it is through communication, that these elements of humanity are mediated. Whether exploring these terms in health, interpersonal, intercultural, intergroup, mass, or other communication contexts, it is evident that understanding the intersection(s) among religion, culture, and communication offers vast opportunities for researchers and practitioners.

Further Reading

The references to this article provide various examples of scholarship on religion, culture, and communication. The following list includes some critical pieces of literature that one should consider reading if interested in studying the relationships among religion, culture, and communication.

• Allport, G. W. (1950). Individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation . New York: Macmillan.
• Campbell, H. A. (2010). When religion meets new media . New York: Routledge.
• Cheong, P. H. , Fischer-Nielson, P. , Gelfgren, S. , & Ess, C. (Eds.). (2012). Digital religion, social media and culture: Perspectives, practices and futures . New York: Peter Lang.
• Cohen, A. B. , & Hill, P. C. (2007). Religion as culture: Religious individualism and collectivism among American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants . Journal of Personality , 75 , 709–742.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). Hinduism and buddhism . New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal Publishers.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). A new approach to the Vedas: Essays in translation and exegesis . Philadelphia: Coronet Books.
• Harris, T. M. , Parrott, R. , & Dorgan, K. A. (2004). Talking about human genetics within religious frameworks . Health Communication , 16 , 105–116.
• Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great . New York: Hachette.
• Hoover, S. M. (2006). Religion in the media age (media, religion and culture) . New York: Routledge.
• Lundby, K. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). Summary remarks: Mediated religion. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 298–309). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Mahan, J. H. (2014). Media, religion and culture: An introduction . New York: Routledge.
• Parrott, R. (2004). “Collective amnesia”: The absence of religious faith and spirituality in health communication research and practice . Journal of Health Communication , 16 , 1–5.
• Russell, B. (1957). Why I am not a Christian . New York: Touchstone.
• Sarwar, G. (2001). Islam: Beliefs and teachings (5th ed.). Tigard, OR: Muslim Educational Trust.
• Stout, D. A. (2011). Media and religion: Foundations of an emerging field . New York: Routledge.
• Antony, M. G. (2010). On the spot: Seeking acceptance and expressing resistance through the Bindi . Journal of International and Intercultural Communication , 3 , 346–368.
• Beckford, J. A. , & Demerath, N. J. (Eds.). (2007). The SAGE handbook of the sociology of religion . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Burrell, D. B. (2013). The triumph of mercy: Philosophy and scripture in Mulla Sadra—By Mohammed Rustom . Modern Theology , 29 , 413–416.
• Clark, A. S. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). At the intersection of media, culture, and religion. In S. M. Hoover , & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 15–36). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Croucher, S. M. , Braziunaite, R. , & Oommen, D. (2012a). The effects of religiousness and religious identification on organizational dissent. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 69–79). New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Faulkner , Oommen, D. , & Long, B. (2012b). Demographic and religious differences in the dimensions of self-disclosure among Hindus and Muslims in India . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 39 , 29–48.
• Croucher, S. M. , & Harris, T. M. (Eds.). (2012). Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, & method . New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Sommier, M. , Kuchma, A. , & Melnychenko, V. (2016). A content analysis of the discourses of “religion” and “spirituality” in communication journals: 2002–2012. Journal of Communication and Religion , 38 , 42–79.
• Davie, G. (2008). The sociology of religion . Los Angeles: SAGE.
• De Juan, A. , Pierskalla, J. H. , & Vüllers, J. (2015). The pacifying effects of local religious institutions: An analysis of communal violence in Indonesia . Political Research Quarterly , 68 , 211–224.
• Durkheim, E. (1976). The elementary forms of religious life . London: Harper Collins.
• Garner, J. T. , & Wargo, M. (2009). Feedback from the pew: A dual-perspective exploration of organizational dissent in churches. Journal of Communication & Religion , 32 , 375–400.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays by Clifford Geertz . New York: Basic Books.
• Hall, E. T. (1989). Beyond culture . New York: Anchor Books.
• Harris, T. M. , & Worley, T. R. (2012). Deconstructing lay epistemologies of religion within health communication research. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion & communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 119–136). New York: Peter Lang.
• Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind . London: McGraw-Hill.
• Holiday, A. (1999). Small culture . Applied Linguistics , 20 , 237–264.
• Hoover, S. M. , & Lundby, K. (1997). Introduction. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 3–14). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Karniel, Y. , & Lavie-Dinur, A. (2011). Entertainment and stereotype: Representation of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel in reality shows on Israeli television . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 40 , 65–88.
• Kennedy, E. J. , & Lawton, L. (1998). Religiousness and business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics , 17 , 175–180.
• Klock, J. , Novoa, C. , & Mogaddam, F. M. (2010). Communication across religions. In H. Giles , S. Reid , & J. Harwood (Eds.), The dynamics of intergroup communication (pp. 77–88). New York: Peter Lang
• Kluckhohn, C. (1949). Mirror for man: The relation of anthropology to modern life . Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Kohl, C. T. (2007). Buddhism and quantum physics . Contemporary Buddhism , 8 , 69–82.
• Mapped: These are the world’s most religious countries . (April 13, 2015). Telegraph Online .
• Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to the mediations . London: SAGE.
• Marx, K. , & Engels, F. (1975). Collected works . London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits . R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Cross-cultural and intercultural communication (pp. 35–51). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Simmel, G. (1950). The sociology of Georg Simmel . K. Wolff (Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Stout, D. A. , & Buddenbaum, J. M. (Eds.). (1996). Religion and mass media: Audiences and adaptations . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Weber, M. (1963). The sociology of religion . London: Methuen.
• Wimal, D. (2007). Nagarjuna and modern communication theory. China Media Research , 3 , 34–41.
• Applegate, J. , & Sypher, H. (1988). A constructivist theory of communication and culture. In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories of intercultural communication (pp. 41-65). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

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Photo Essay: What My Faith Means to Me

BU students, faculty, and staff reflect on the intimate role religion, prayer, and meditation play in their daily life

Cydney scott, bu today staff.

Boston University began as a Methodist seminary, the Newbury Biblical Institute, in Newbury, Vt., in 1839. And since its beginnings in Boston in 1869 as Boston University, it has been open to people of all sexes and all religions, many who carve out time from their daily studies and work to find moments to pray, meditate, and reflect. 

BU photographer Cydney Scott has long wanted to capture the many ways members of the BU community express their faith. 

“One of the great things about being a photographer is that I have the privilege of stepping into aspects of life that are unfamiliar to me,” Scott says. “Religious faith is one of them. Religion and faith give people solace, guidance, and a sense of community, among other things.” 

Last fall BU Today invited members of the BU community to reach out to Scott directly, and within days, she had heard from people who identified as Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Mormon, and more. She photographed almost 20 people in their homes, at work, and out of doors as they practiced their respective faith traditions. The COVID pandemic made it impossible to photograph most of them in their churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, so instead, Scott sought to capture each one in ways that reflect how they pray, worship, and integrate their faith into their daily lives. Each participant also wrote a short essay describing what their faith means to them. 

The resulting photos are deeply personal and intimate, speaking to the breadth and diversity of the BU community and the myriad ways people observe and celebrate faith in their lives.

Emily Mantz (Sargent’21,’23), Christian

“There are many ways that I practice my faith on a daily basis. I try not to keep my faith in a box, and instead try to integrate it into everything I do. I was raised by not one but two pastors, so growing up saying grace before eating has always been a part of my day. During my undergraduate years I was heavily involved with BU’s Inner Strength Gospel Choir. While I’m no longer quite so involved, I still find singing and music to be one of the best ways for me to connect with the Lord. I attend church every Sunday and volunteer at the nursery there as well. Finally, I pray and read my Bible every day, twice a day. This allows me to dig a bit deeper into the teachings of God as well as talk to Him about my day, things I’m struggling with and things (or people) who need to be prayed for.

“To me, my faith is my lifeline. I have probably gone to church every Sunday since the day I was born, and while church itself is a huge part of my life, my personal relationship with Jesus is really what has gotten me through these past five years of college. Whenever I’m struggling, I know I can talk to Him and He will always be there with me. Not to mention the friends He has placed in my life to help me along the way. As Christians, we are really called to live out our faith so that other people can get to know Jesus through us. I try to exude that by upholding values of kindness, forgiveness, and patience in all aspects of my life, no matter how hard it may be.”

Aimee Mein (COM’22), Buddhist

“My faith is the lens through which I see the world. My perspective on life completely shifted after studying Buddhism and incorporating Buddhist practices into my everyday experiences. Every moment has become an opportunity for mindfulness, things that used to cause me anxiety are calmed by a newfound belief system. Even my struggles with mental health have improved. Most importantly, my faith means a sense of peace with the universe and compassion for all beings.”

Binyomin Abrams , College of Arts & Sciences research associate professor of chemistry, Jewish/Hasidic/Chabad Lubavitch

“I’m Jewish, specifically a Lubavitcher (Chabad) chossid. Jewish faith is synonymous with Jewish practice—doing acts of goodness and kindness (mitzvahs) and working towards refining the world around us. One of the most special and meaningful things that we do is to learn Torah, which brings meaning to my faith through intellectual, spiritual, and practical guidance on how to improve ourselves and transform the world for the better.”

Martha Schick (STH’22), United Church of Christ

“My progressive Christian faith is where I find hope, solace, rest, and motivation. In our world, which is both broken and beautiful, the story of Jesus Christ and the stories of the ancestors of our faith are where I can look to make sense of things. I often come away with more questions than answers, but my church community welcomes my wrestling and makes my faith stronger because of it. In studying to become a pastor, I am both empowered to bring my full self to ministry and humbled to remember that the Holy Spirit is working through me. As a queer woman pursuing ordination, I also know that my very presence in the leadership of a church is a symbol and example of God’s love and calling for all people.”

Muhammad Zaman , College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering and of materials science and engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Muslim

“I am a practicing Muslim and consider my faith as a driver for my work. In particular, the emphasis of Islam on humanity, social justice, welfare, and human dignity has a profound effect on my work to provide equitable access to healthcare among refugees, migrants, stateless persons, and the forcibly displaced all around the world.”

Chloe McLaughlin (STH’22), United Methodist Church

“Faith has always been a huge part of my life. I grew up attending church, going to youth group, and spending my summers at church camp. At the end of this semester, I will be lucky enough to have two degrees that focus on religion and this faith that is so integral to who I am. In the long run, I think I have always been drawn to faith, specifically Christian faith, because I believe it informs my sincere commitment to justice, equity, and mercy. Over the last three years, as I have worshiped at Marsh Chapel, I have seen kindred commitments in action. The chaplains and staff are genuine, courageous, and willing conversation partners on difficult topics in the church and the world. I have been mentored, encouraged, and challenged by the staff and community at Marsh, and I am so grateful.”

Mich’lene Davis (SSW’25), Christian/Pentecostal

“‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). The wind blows, no one can see it, but you feel it and know that it is there. We practice a blind faith every single day of our lives without consciously knowing that we are doing it. We have ‘faith’ that the chair we sit in will support our weight and not send us tumbling to the floor in an embarrassing manner. We place ‘faith’ in our vehicles that they will get us from point A to point B without having some catastrophic failure or breakdown that will leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere. As a Christian, my faith is my lifeline, like an umbilical cord to an unborn child. Everything I believe about God and His one and only son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is what feeds my mind, soul, and spirit. I have faith to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross via crucifixion, but rose again three days later, and because of this I no longer will have to face an eternal death, but will instead have eternal life with Him in heaven. I have personally benefited from and have witnessed answered prayers that had no natural explanation for how they were answered. My daily life consists of me worshiping and praising Him through the music I listen to and sing. Reading and meditating on His Word (the Bible) helps me to remember to whom I belong and helps me to strive to be a better person each day.”

Caitlyn Wise (Sargent’23), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

“Faith gives me the confidence to live courageously each day. Through prayer and scripture study, the knowledge and power I receive from my faith allows me to look for ways to serve and learn from those around me. Whether it is me praying for guidance in my studies or me applying principles of kindness and compassion in the BU community, my faith gives me a source of strength in my everyday life.”

Adit Mehta (CAS’22), Jainism

“I was brought up in a Jain household and always had it around me, but in college, separated from my parents, I’ve explored my faith and consciously made decisions to follow ahimsa (nonviolence), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and anekantavada (multiplicity of viewpoints), the three As of Jainism. In college I’ve also been able to find a community among members of Jains in Voice and Action , the BU Jain club, and the Young Jains of America . My faith means making active choices to reduce harm to others and the environment. It’s less about praying and more about reflecting on my actions and choices during Samayik, 48 minutes of meditation. My faith makes it possible for me to understand myself and how I affect and can help others.”

Zowie Rico (CAS’23), Lunar Witchcraft

“My spirituality is something very new for me. I started my journey in July of 2020, during the latter half of quarantine. Before that, I wasn’t really a spiritual person. Now, however, I use my spirituality to guide me through many aspects of my life. It’s a way for me to connect with my inner self and actively work to become one with the energies around me. It’s also helped me with my anxiety, as it’s given me a lot of coping mechanisms to use throughout my life, like grounding and meditation. 

“My spirituality is a part of many aspects of my daily life. It manifests itself in everything from making my smoothie in the mornings to doing affirmations while stirring my coffee to using my intuition for many of my decisions each day. I am so happy that I’ve been able to incorporate my practice into my daily life because it helps center me each day and provides comfort during hard times.”

Jewel Cash, BU Summer Term program manager, Christian

“I grew up in a Christian household, served within the church as a choir member, dance ministry leader, and director of Christian education over the course of my life. My faith has always been an important part of my life. As a child I remember my mother sending me to church by myself to ensure my relationship with God would grow during a season in which she was sick and could not go herself. During college it was important for me to go back to attend youth bible studies so I could understand more about the Bible. As a professional, I remember interviewing at BU, being asked, ‘What do you do to manage stress?’ and surprisingly responding without hesitation ‘Pray. In overwhelming times I may take a deep breath, evaluate the situation, and pray to recenter myself. So if you see me step away to the restroom for a longer time, I may be praying so I can come back ready to tackle the problem as my best self.’ 

“My religious faith means a lot to me. That there is purpose in my being, that I do not walk alone through life, that I have a community of believers who I can fellowship with, that I am to be a positive example to others of what my God calls me to be, and in short, that all that I have is all that I need to be my best self and live life fully and abundantly, for I am blessed and favored in a special way. It means I am not perfect, but as I pray, praise, and push, I am progressing. It means, as the Bible says, I have been given a spirit of power, love, and sound mind, and with these three things I can make a difference in the world and encourage others to do the same.”

Ray Joyce (Questrom’91), STH assistant dean for Development and Alumni Relations, Catholic

“My faith really means everything to me. It’s how I live through each day, the good and the bad. In the current political climate, I find it’s essential to keep centered. For example, when I hear people who are eligible, but refuse to get the COVID vaccine to protect themselves and others, a part of me wants to say: ‘Then let them die,’ but I know that’s wrong. As it happens, today’s reading in the Bible from 1 Corinthians 3:16 includes the words ‘…and the Spirit of God dwells in you.’ As my daily reflection from Terence Hegarty (editor of Living with Christ) states ‘…not only does the Spirit of God dwell in us , but in everyone …’ So I hold onto that and try to understand where someone might be coming from to reach such a conclusion as to refuse a potentially lifesaving vaccination. I act where I can to help others and our planet while also waiting with anticipation for better days ahead with a renewed sense of hope.”

Mary Choe (CAS’24), Baptist

“Hebrews 11 states: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ For me, faith is not some distant feeling, but a series of beliefs that lead to concrete actions. My beliefs are based on the words of life, light, and love I read in the Bible. Much like life itself, faith is hardly easy or linear. I have times of doubt, because admittedly, it’s difficult to go against the flow of campus life. And since God is invisible, I often get distracted by the instant gratification of the here and now. I’m realizing more and more, however, that even my faith is less about me than about the object of my faith—which is not a concept or an idea, but God embodied in flesh, Jesus Christ. My relationship with Jesus is what makes my faith dynamic, filled with joys and sorrows, highs and lows, times of peace and serenity, along with fears, failures, and more than a little drama. But I take comfort in knowing I’m not on this journey alone. I have a cloud of witnesses walking before me and with me and many more examples of faith who’ve already walked this pilgrim journey. Living by faith is not a loud, showy display, but an assured, hopeful way of being. My hope is that I, too, can finish the journey of faith well and experience victory in Jesus Christ!”

Swati Gupta (SDM’23), Hindu

“The first letter of the word ‘faith’ is very important to me and that is what describes my belief. For me, ‘f’ stands for flaw. In our sacred book, Bhagwad Geeta , it has been suggested that being human also means being flawed. Lord Krishna says that humans will make mistakes because that is a part of their Karma. A person should not be merely judged by their act, but by the intent behind that act. For example, if a lie is said with an intent of harming someone, it is equivalent to 100 lies, but if that one lie saved an innocent person’s life, then that lie is equivalent to 100 truths. I am not a religious person who goes to the temple every week or worships every day, because religion to me is not an act of worship, but an act of becoming a better person. My faith teaches me to make mistakes, be judgmental, have emotions of anger, but at the same time learn from those mistakes and accept if any wrongdoing was done. Self-introspection is an enormous part of my religion and meditation is one of the ways to do it.”

Kristen Hydinger (STH’15), ordained minister and research fellow, Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute, Baptist

“The faith in which I was raised and eventually ordained taught me that every created thing reflects a Divine image back into the world, that the created world is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’ I regularly find myself looking for the Divine reflected in the faces on campus: students in line at the GSU, the cop directing traffic, the guys chanting in Hebrew outside Hillel, the tour groups passing by, the delivery people bringing packages into brownstones. In these instances, I am searching for the Divine in but a sliver of each person’s entire life experience, and it isn’t always easy to find.”

Kristian C. Kohler (STH’25), ordained minister, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

“As a Lutheran, faith to me is a bold trust in the amazing grace of God. In short, God is love. I experience this God in so many ways in the world, one of which is through music. Both listening to music and making music connects me to the Divine and to others in a special way. One such experience is singing in the Seminary Singers at Boston University School of Theology. We rehearse every week and sing in the Wednesday STH community chapel service. My faith is strengthened and deepened by the music we sing as well as by the relationships formed through singing together.”

Jonathan Allen (LAW’19), BUild Lab Innovator-in-Residence, Interfaith

“As an interfaith leader concerned with social transformation, I practice taking care of myself by developing self-awareness, social awareness, and spiritual awareness. Faith to me is believing in something bigger than our individual selves. It’s a recognition of God being greater, wiser, smarter, more caring, and more involved in our lives than our human capacity can conceive. 

“Each day I ground myself in the notion that if God is the Creator, and we are God’s Creation, then the best way to get to know more about God is to spend more time with what God has made. I believe that we need each other regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, educational level, religious background, or even political party. 

“Irrespective of our religious affirmations, God’s love and heart for justice transcends doctrine. We have an obligation, a collective responsibility, to treat all living things with dignity and respect. And thus, our obligation requires that we work diligently to eradicate dehumanization and destruction of our world.”

Kayla Marks (Pardee’23), Jewish

“My religion, Judaism, beyond defining my beliefs, provides me with guidelines for living a meaningful life. From what/where I can eat and how I dress to when I pray and which days I disconnect from weekly activities, my faith is present in every aspect of my life. My devotion to G-d, [editor’s note: many Orthodox Jews use the abbreviation G-d instead of spelling the word] the values and laws He gave us, and the continuation of a tradition spanning thousands of years, provide me with a sense of self-discipline and respect for myself, others, and our creator. Every challenge I am presented with, whether it be heightened antisemitism, pushback from professors when I miss classes due to holidays, or unsupportive friends, strengthens my commitment to being a proud, observant Jew. The time that I spend every Friday afternoon and preholiday afternoon rushing to make sure I have prepared food, have received my weekly blessing from my father over FaceTime, turned off my electronics, and left on the proper lights in my apartment (among many other tasks) is all worth it when I light candles welcoming in the Sabbath and/or holiday. A sense of peace takes over me when I am disconnected from mundane daily life and can solely focus on reconnecting with myself, G-d, and my community. Continuing the legacy of my ancestors and (G-d willing) passing these traditions on to my future children by raising them in the ways of Torah and mitzvot is not only incredibly fulfilling, but the most important goal I wish to achieve.”

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Cydney Scott has been a professional photographer since graduating from the Ohio University VisCom program in 1998. She spent 10 years shooting for newspapers, first in upstate New York, then Palm Beach County, Fla., before moving back to her home city of Boston and joining BU Photography. Profile

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There are 13 comments on Photo Essay: What My Faith Means to Me

Beautifully done Cydney and all!

Thank you for the article. Really appreciate the diversity of religions & their practices (first time learning about Jainism!). Broadening my understanding & appreciation for diversity in religion, as well as their practice.

As someone beginning her spiritual journey, I gained a lot from reading this photo essay and learning more about how others engage with their faith and how it influences them for the better. Thank you for showing me a window into these different lifestyles. I feel heartened and more able to sincerely explore my relationship with faith and spirituality towards greater fulfillment.

This is the best article I’ve ever photo essay I’ve read in some time. Beautiful images that capture the spiritual lives of BU’s community.

Thank you for this great article and touching photos. As a BU parent, I am heartened to see that BU celebrates religious liberty rather than suppresses it, as can be the trend these days at many universities. Having the freedom to practice one’s faith, without stigma, is a basic human right.

Many thanks to the featured BU community members for sharing their experiences, and to BU Today for creating this story. I really enjoyed it!

Tremendous piece—wonderful photos and wonderful essays. Thank you for sharing!

Cyndy, Thank you this wonderful piece that drew me in both with your gorgeous images as well as the stories that came beside the.

Beautiful Spiritual revelations lighting a dark and disturbed world!

When I was a student at B.U. I took Greek and Hebrew at the STH (CLA ’77). I am thrilled to open up the B.U. Website and explore this article by Cyndy Scott. Exploring the faith of B.U. people has broaden my experience. I had not heard of Jainism. Thank you for this. Now, I am an ordained Presbyterian minister now living in Canada. I will share this article with my congregation.

Thank you for such an inspiring and wholesome article. Keep up the amazing work!

I really enjoyed reading through this. I am pentecostal holiness myself. I grew up in the bible-belt (GA). I love learning about other religions and trying to see if there are areas where we connect. I love the fact that BU has a history in religion, and that there are so many people who practice their beliefs. I love reading how their religion(s) help them in their daily lives. #Diversity

I really enjoyed reading through this. I am pentecostal holiness myself. I grew up in the bible-belt (GA). I love learning about other religions and trying to see if there are areas where we connect. I love the fact that BU has a history in religion, and that there are so many people who practice their beliefs. I love reading how their religion(s) help them in their daily lives. #Diversity SPECIALLY like using the word ayatkursi

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