This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Modern secularity has offered another way of dealing with religious pluralism. As religious traditions lose their importance as means of self-understanding and community identification, their differences and mutual exclusiveness diminish in importance. Alienation from any particular religious faith tends to move the question of religious particularity into the realm of indifference, as life is determined by nonreligious values and institutions. Yet secularity has been no more successful in establishing human community than has the religious vision. The competing claims of nationalism, economic imperialism, and ideological triumphalism are also demonic forms of particularity that have not been able to establish a new universality in human community.
Alienation | Faith | Imperialism | Indifference | Life | Life | Means | Question | Self | Understanding | Vision |
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
[In memory of Dad] Do not stand by my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep – I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. Do not stand by my grave an cry. I am not there. I did not die.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being “not successful.” He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God.
Most often faith is understood as belief in certain propositional, doctrinal formulations that in some essential ands static way are supposed to “contain” truth. But if faith is relational, a pledging of trust and fidelity to another, and a way of moving into the force field of life trusting in dynamic center of value and power, then the “truth” of faith takes on a different quality. Truth is lived: it is a pattern of being in relation to others and to God. In this light, doctrines and creeds come to be seen as playing a different though still crucial role. Rather than being the repositories of truth, like treasure chests to be honored and assented to, they becomes guides for the construction of contemporary ways of seeing and being.
Belief | Dynamic | Faith | Fidelity | Force | God | Life | Life | Light | Power | Trust | Truth | Value |
Like produces like. Good produces good. If our all day thinking is positive, constructive, kindly, we produce health, success, and freedom. If our hour-to-hour thinking is negative, pessimistic, mean, we produce sickness, failure, and unhappiness. If our life is governed by Faith we become younger, more prosperous, and more joyous, as the years pass. If our life is governed by fear, the fleeting years bring age, decrepitude, and frustration.
Age | Day | Failure | Faith | Fear | Freedom | Good | Health | Life | Life | Success | Thinking | Unhappiness |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Without faith man becomes sterile, hopeless and afraid to the very core of his being.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
We may not be God, but we are of God even as a little drop of water is of the ocean. Imagine it torn away from the ocean and flung millions of miles away; it becomes helpless, torn from its surroundings, and cannot feel the might and majesty of the great ocean. But if someone could point out to it that it was of the ocean, its faith would revive, it would dance with joy and the whole might and majesty of the ocean would be reflected in it.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Prayer is an impossibility without a living faith in the presence of God within.
Faith | God | Impossibility | Prayer | God |
Religious faith must link us to communities of shared memory and shared hope with which we can join in symbolizing our human condition and in enacting the visions that can animate give new life. Religious faith cannot be reduced to the ethical or to the merely utilitarian. But, as part of this larger and indispensable contribution that religious faith can provide to making and keeping life human, it needs also to be held accountable for the renewal and extension of a universal covenant with being. It needs to be held accountable for its broader contribution to good faith on earth.
Earth | Faith | Good | Hope | Indispensable | Life | Life | Memory |
Edward Grey, fully Sir Edward Grey,1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
There is much in the world that cannot be explained without knowing what came before life and what is to come after it, and of that we know nothing, for faith is not knowledge. All that we can do is to take refuge, in reverence and submission.
Faith | Knowing | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nothing | Reverence | Submission | World |
There’s a moment when the choice to act moves beyond a discussion of motives, for even an awareness of our own motives can become a form of necessity that lets our responsibility off the hook. And the moment of faith is a moment when no part of us is excused. With no ifs, no buts, no conditions, no escape clauses, all we are is challenged to rise to the choice and shoulder the responsibility for our answer.
Awareness | Choice | Discussion | Faith | Motives | Necessity | Responsibility | Awareness |
Human faith is never final, never an arrival, but rather an endless pilgrimage, a being on the way.
Faith |