Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Reading 1 - Faith As A Dimension of The Human
Reading 1 - Faith As A Dimension of The Human
3
ultimate concern or as “setting one’s heart upon,”4 it takes the form of an engagement of all of a
human being’s energies and powers. It can in turn be mediated by a variety of different kinds of
experiences: a response to beauty, a negative response to human suffering, an attraction to a
supreme value or good, a decision to direct one’s whole life in a certain way.
Faith is central and centering: central because it emerges out of the center of one’s free
being; centering because it unifies, integrates, and holds together all aspects of the personality.
Of course, such a characterization of faith describes it in an almost ideal form. Faith takes on
different psychological forms according to different stages in its development.5 The principal or
confessed object of faith may actually have rivals that may or may not be conscious. Faith most
distinctively is an adult phenomenon, although it can still exist in less developed forms. Even
though they are human, new-borns do not have faith in the sense described here, any more than
they possess language in a developed way. Yet one should see continuities; basic human trust
can be nurtured from the very beginning of human life.6
Source: Roger Haights, sj. Dynamics of Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.