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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Speaking of Faith

Krista Tippett, pp. 3-4:
Of this I'm certain: the religious energy of our world now is not in essence a rejection of all disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades-- law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. Our most heated debates--on marriage, or stem-cell research, or abortion--defy the boundaries of legal rulings and political rights into which we've attempted to fit them. They drive back to the mysteries of human life and human sexuality. They are prisms for deep questions about identity, relationship, and love in our time. The also arouse fierce human impulses both to question difference and to defend it. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code-- but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments cannot contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Law, politics, and economics seem like the little questions, but they still effect the answers we choose--or even the questioning in which we luxuriate--for the big unknown of life's meaning. It goes back to Maslow's heirarchy of needs: one cannot examine the higher ideologies until the basic necessities are met.

I really like Krista Tippett's show, though I don't get a chance to listen often. I generally come away from it thinking more than I did before.

Anonymous said...

Tippet will be discussing "Are the holidays really about faith?" with Vanecia wills-Leufroy on www.radiosandysprings.com/womansspirit.php on Nov. 7 2-3PM