Many thanks to listener Anne Totten for her work in transcribing this episode!
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CW: Okay, so then maybe that isn’t unfair for me to say. I think faith is just training wheels for Mormons.
SH: I’m afraid that we do think of it that way, yes. Whereas for me, faith is where the durability comes from. Because belief is brittle, certainty is brittle. All of these things can be stripped away from you and I feel like you don’t always have control over that.
And if people wanna argue with that, go listen to our beliefs episode. We talked a lot about it, but I don’t think that we always have control over things like our certainty and our belief. But faith lives in a different space.
CW: Yes.
SH: And everything about it is different.
Hello, I’m Susan Hinckley.
CW: And I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today’s episode is “Big Ideas: Faith.”
CW: Welcome back, Susan. Season 12.
SH: Welcome back, Cynthia.
CW: I’m excited. You and I have been talking over the last, I don’t know, month or two, trying to brainstorm season 12.
And I think we loved season 11 so much we’re gonna continue with a lot of those same themes of big ideas and our what do you say episodes. So I hope that’s okay with our listeners because hopefully more than just you and me enjoyed the last season.
SH: Right. Right. (laughter) Oh, well, I say don’t mess with success.
And I really felt like our season 11 episodes were some of my favorites, for a lot of different reasons. I loved having so many more women’s voices on our podcast last season. And so for sure wanna do the “What Do You Say” episodes. And I am all in on talking about big ideas. So let’s do it.
CW: Let’s do it.
Well, why a conversation about faith, Susan? What are we doing?
SH: Well, we opened season 11 with a conversation about belief, and I think that faith is a related big idea. But I don’t really think that the relationship is exactly like a lot of church members think it is.
CW: Right.
SH: Right? So—and maybe this is just in my own head, I don’t know, Cynthia. Maybe I’m the only one who had faith and belief tangled up, but I totally did!
CW: No, me too, then!
SH: But I think we also get faith confused with a lot of other things like obedience and knowledge.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And then there’s all this other stuff. If you were doing the faith word cloud, there’s all this other stuff that I think would pop up in there, which would be things like doubt and certainty.
CW: Yeah.
SH: So there are all these related ideas that are kind of flowing around. And so sometimes with a big idea, I like to pluck one of them out and really kind of break it down a little, dive into it, and see some of the ideas that can make it hard to pin down exactly what we’re talking about when we’re talking about something like faith.
CW: Mmm hmm. Did you feel like—because I know you just re-listened to our belief episode as did I in preparation because we didn’t wanna say every single thing the same. Right.
SH: Right.
CW: —But I really felt like as I listened to our belief episode, I kept coming to like a fork in a road where I was like, this is where we could go down the faith route.
And so I feel like today that’s what we’re gonna do is kinda hit some of those forks in the road.
SH: Yeah. Same forks. We’re just gonna go down the other path
CW: Yep.
SH: Right. Yeah. I love that metaphor. I think it’s perfect for approaching this. We’re traveling down the path and you come to the fork and one side’s belief and the other side’s faith.
So we’re gonna talk about faith. And hopefully we’ll get it right. We’re gonna talk about faith according to our experience, right? We’re not experts about any of this stuff, but how these words have continued to evolve for us and within our own spiritual lives. And that’s all we’re ever talking about on “At Last She Said It.”
So let’s put a “your mileage may vary” right at the top of this conversation.
CW: Let’s just have that disclaimer for the whole season. How about that?
SH: Exactly! Okay, as I started to think about this topic over several days when I was planning getting the notes ready, my mind kind of kept going back to the lyrics of the hymn, “When Faith Endures.”
CW: Oh!
