Many years ago when I was working in New York I found myself on a bus with a friend, arguing about religion.  We had known each other since we were children in Hawaii; she was an atheist, or maybe an agnostic (I was never really sure), I was Roman Catholic, and religion had always been a strange area of silence and even strain between us, one of the few things we rarely talked about during slumber parties or after-school walks to the ice cream store.  And now here we were in our twenties, living in New York, starting our adult lives, and she wanted to know why I still went to church every Sunday.  I felt curiously shy and inarticulate, trying to talk about my faith in front of this person I had known for most of my life.

Image courtesy of bbc.co.uk/radio4

But she continued to push, asking me to explain…

Jaroslav Pelikan

This morning, American Public Media’s “Speaking of Faith” replayed an interview with the late, great Jaroslav Pelikan on creeds and how they function within religious belief. Excellent stuff. One of Pelikan’s last big projects before his death resulted in the book Credo.

Pelikan once came up with one of the all-time great quotes on this subject: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

Two things strike me about creeds. One, they contain a sparkling minimalism. When you think of all the volumes of Christian theology written over the centuries, the Christian creeds are exceptionally short summaries of belief. That minimalism is even more true of the Jewish shema or Islam’s shahadah.

Two, their spoken power has a poetic resonance. When I listen and speak the Apostles Creed, I hear a unique poetic rhythm at work. Creeds are meant to be sung.

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Believe the earth is flat, or I'll kill you. Are you able to ignore the evidence that says otherwise?

Eternal bliss or eternal suffering, each at a level so profound that we cannot begin to imagine the plenary ecstasy of heaven or the relentless horror of hell. This,  Christians contend, is what is at stake as we try to decide whether or not to believe in Jesus as God.

But even this “choice” misunderstands the concept of belief. Belief is not a decision, but rather an intellectual position to which we are taken by evidence (evidence which can include, I am told, personal revelations from God, a courtesy not yet extended to me). We can’t believe the earth is flat, even if threatened with death for that disbelief, because the evidence tells us it’s spherical.

Yet according to the Christian proposition, we must believe certain things to avoid damnation. What are they? Besides the…

credit: turnbacktogod

When Kathy Nance and other new Civil Religon bloggers gathered at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other morning, we got to talking about who we were and what religion we represented. When Kathy used the word “pagan” to describe herself, I asked her to define the word. She was good enough to do just that in her first post, A Pagan’s Primer.

Well, what about Catholicism? Who are we and what do we believe? Every Sunday at Mass we answer that question when we stand to recite a summary of our faith, the Nicene Creed. This affirmation of faith occurs after we have heard the first reading, joined in the responsorial psalm, heard the second reading, heard the Gospel and the homily.

We stand to say the Nicene Creed.

The creed I’m introducing  below is the new translation which will come into use in 2011 or 2012. This translation is from the…