… The Contemporary Novel of Belief, Part 2.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to look at Elie’s use of the word “belief.” This gave me pause. To take the mysterious human encounter with the divine and reduce it to the deracinated term “belief” feels odd coming from someone with such a profoundly literary sensibility.
Why not the less rationalistic, more human word “faith”—a term that has more of the heart in it and less of the head?
This makes sense to me, since it is this business of belief that reduces faith to a checklist of rights and wrongs, do's and don't's — something Pope Francis was getting at recently — that quickly devolves into turning your faith into a political platform and not much else. Faith has a hell of a lot less to do with what you think than with how you think. It has most of all to do with how you live.
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