Hipster Intellectuals Who Believe in God

Hipster Intellectuals Who Believe in God

Two friends, one Jewish and one Catholic, talk faith
By Scott Korb, Peter Bebergal, January 23, 2008

To say that we believe means that at the center of our lives is an idea of God.

Now, our embarrassment, shame, nerves and fear around making this very simple claim have had mostly to do with wanting to keep our faiths free of associations with scriptural literalism and religious narrow-mindedness. We haven’t wanted to be misunderstood. And because we’ve been embarrassed and hesitant, our professions of faith, when we’ve made them, have tended to be almost entirely defensive. Yes, we believe, but we’re not like those fundamentalists and the Bible-thumpers. Yes, we believe, but we’re not on the front lines arguing against gay marriage or stem-cell research. Yes, we believe, but we’re not praying to usher in the end of the world. Yes, we believe, but we’re not the Moral Majority. Yes, we believe, but we’re not going to try to convince you to believe what we do.

All this backsliding, all these buts, have often made ours a negative faith. Because we find certain, often very public, religious views not just distasteful but also often culturally blinkered and politically dangerous — arguments for a six-thousand-year-old Earth, for example, turn our stomachs as much as they offend the truths we know about the natural world — until recently, we’d turned inward.

Before we knew each other, our faiths had been our own private affairs, pilgrimages we’ve undertaken in the hope of both finding and, yes, pleasing God. All alone, unfortunately we could do neither.

More at:
http://www.jewcy.com/faithhacker/hipster_intellectuals_who_believe_god#

Excerpted from The Faith Between Us by Scott Korb and Peter Bebergal (Bloomsbury, 2007)

I love, in particular, this phrasing, because it says something about where this particular fallen Catholic has found herself after almost 60 years:

In the end, we see religion as a way to engage ethically with our commitments to God in daily life, rather than a preparation for a final encounter with God in the afterlife. And all this without any shared belief in what God is, or is not.