Do Latter-day Saints believe our own stuff about faith? How does it differ from all the other words we sometimes get it tangled up with? What role is it meant to play in our lives and discipleship? Where and how might it intersect with love? In Episode 271, Susan and Cynthia are back for ALSSI Season 12 with a conversation exploring one of the biggest ideas in Christianity: Faith.
Notes & Quotes:
Faith as Participation and Trust that God Cares About the Now, Center for Action and Contemplation, 4/10/2016
The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement, by Laura Swan
Faith Mends the Breach, Center for Action and Contemplation, 10/19/2023
Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, by Sharon Salzberg
Faith is a Verb, Rosanna M. White
What We Talk About When We Talk About God, by Rob Bell
Faith and Doubt Are Not Opposites, Center for Action and Contemplation, 2/3/2021
Job and the Truth About Suffering, Aubrey and Tim Chaves with Dr. Mike Petrow, Faith Matters podcast, 8/9/2026
Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home, by Barbara Brown Taylor
Bowing to What Is – ‘All In This Together’ Inspired Article #1, Jack Kornfield, 1/7/2026
I and Thou, by Martin Buber
At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations About Faith, Church, and Everything In Between, by Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward
When Faith Endures
(hymn 128)
I will not doubt, I will not fear;
God’s love and strength are always near.
His promised gift helps me to find
An inner strength and peace of mind.
I give the Father willingly
My trust, my prayers, humility.
His Spirit guides, his love assures
That fear departs when faith endures.
Doctrine &Covenants 6: 36-7—”Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not. Behold the wounds which pierced my side, and also the prints of the nails in my hands and feet; be faithful, keep my commandments, and ye shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.”
“Faith” is not an affirmation of a creed, an intellectual acceptance of God, or believing certain doctrines to be true or orthodox (although those things might well be good). Yet that seems to be what many Christians have whittled faith down to. Such faith does not usually change your heart or your lifestyle.” —Richard Rohr
“I’m convinced that much modern atheism is a result of such a heady and really ineffective definition of faith. We defined faith intellectually, so people came up with intellectual arguments against it and then said, “I don’t believe in God.” —Richard Rohr
“God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love; God can only be experienced in communion. This is why Jesus “commands” us to move toward love and fully abide there.” —Richard Rohr
"I urge you again and again to practice true love and to aspire to truth and perfection, that you may satisfy God, please Him (God], and do Him honor and justice, first in Himself [God's Presence] and then in the good people He loves and who love Him, and may you give them all they need whatever their state may be. This I urge you to do unceasingly, and this I have done since I came among you, for it is the best and most becoming way to serve God.” —Hadewijch, (Belgian Beguine, poet and mystic)
“Now I know that faith is not believing-certain-ideas-all-evidence-to-the-contrary. It is not dogged loyalty to childhood conditioning or pledges of allegiance to sacred formulas and official explanations. It is surely not the addictive repetition of rituals or practices that keep God under control. These approaches give the ego comfort…” —Richard Rohr
“When we claim our right to question everything, including our beliefs, we can unhook from our dependence on what is familiar and let in the heartfelt, open, fresh quality of faith.” —Sharon Salzberg
“Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse and it is alive and well and searching and exploring.” —Rob Bell
“I worry about ‘true believers’ who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Saint Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997) learned to do. Doubt and faith are actually correlative terms. People of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow. Mother Teresa experienced decades of this kind of doubt, as was revealed after her death. In a letter to a trusted spiritual director she wrote, ‘Darkness is such that I really do not see — neither with my mind nor with my reason. — The place of God in my soul is blank. — There is no God in me.’ The very fact that the world media and people in general were scandalized by this demonstrates how limited is our understanding of the nature of biblical faith.” —Richard Rohr
“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson
“If there is nothing we can do right now but wait, then as T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘the faith is in the waiting.’” —Sharon Salzberg
“Faith has more to do with staying fully present to what is happening right in front of you than with being certain of what it all means. The meeting is the thing.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
“Bowing doesn’t mean liking what’s happening. It doesn’t mean giving up. It means acknowledging what is before trying to make it something else. It is the difference between fighting the moment and meeting it.” —Jack Kornfield
”All real living is meeting.” —Martin Buber
“But what if the point is not to decode the cloud but to enter into it? What if the whole Bible is less a book of certainties than it is a book of encounters, in which a staggeringly long parade of people run into God, each other, life—and are never the same again? [...] Whether such biblical encounters register in human consciousness as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ they have a way of breaking biblical people open, of rearranging what they think they know for sure so that there is room for more divine movement in their lives. Sometimes the movement involves traveling from one place to another. Sometimes it means changing their angle on what is true and why. Sometimes it involves the almost invisible movement of one heart toward another. Certainties can become casualties in these encounters…” —Barbara Brown Taylor
“That small softening was the bow.” —Jack Kornfield
”The imagination should be allowed a certain freedom to browse around.” —Thomas Merton
“I have found no downside to letting my head off its leash as often as it begs to go. The more information my head brings back for my heart to consider, the more my capacity for understanding grows. Faith begins in the same place hope does: a place my head can’t rule no matter how much it tries to assert its own importance.” —Susan Hinckley, (p. 129)
“Our faith is not a faith that dogmas or moral opinions are true, but a faith that Ultimate Reality/God/Christ is accessible to us—and even on our side.” —Richard Rohr
“Faith, in contrast to belief, is not a definition of reality, not a received answer, but an active, open state that makes us willing to explore. While beliefs come to us from outside—from another person or a tradition or heritage—faith comes from within, from our alive participation in the process of discovery. Alan Watts summed up the difference simply and pointedly as, ‘Belief clings, faith lets go.’”—Sharon Salzberg
“With their assumptions of correctness, beliefs try to make a known out of the unknown. They make presumptions about what is yet to come, how it will be, what it will mean, and how it will affect us. Faith, on the other hand, doesn’t carve out reality according to our preconceptions and desires. It doesn’t decide how we are going to perceive something but rather is the ability to move forward.” —Sharon Salzberg