An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.
But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it.…