A Crisis of Faith, Scary Popes, and William Gladstone

William Gladstone presided as Prime Minister of Great Britain on four separate occasions between 1868 to 1894. Gladstone was preoccupied both personally and politically with religion, and his personal faith journey reflected the larger crisis of faith occurring in Britain in the nineteenth century as secularism and urbanization began to erode the place of faith in common life. Many scholars have referred to this period as the “Victorian Crisis of Faith.” This paper examines his personal diaries and extensive writings to understand his zest for religion, primarily regarding the supposed papal aggression of 1850 in Great Britain and his personal faith crises. The significance of this paper is that it highlights how both personally and politically this key leader was working to understand the role of religion in public life in nineteenth-century Great Britain.

The Holes of an Ordinary Life

Many modern readers of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina view Anna’s passionate and scandalous romance with Vronsky as tragically heroic insofar as she desires nothing more than true love at any cost. These readers tend to view the story of Levin’s faith journey as inconsequential. This paper argues that such a reading is counter to Tolstoy’s intended message. Tolstoy intended to write a novel about the challenges of Christian faith in nineteenth century Russia. In doing so, he rewrote Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a manner consistent with his own emphasis upon the importance of the natural life—a life which embraces the natural cycle of birth and death and avoids the artificiality of urban, cosmopolitan life.

Public Conversion, Private Reason, and Institutional Crisis

Following the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report, which detailed the sexual abuse of clergy members, many have questioned the value of personal institutional commitment to the Catholic Church, preferring instead more individualistic expressions of faith. Alongside the sex abuse crisis, the age of free information makes the Church’s epistemology appear antiquated. This article explores the individualistic versus community-based practice of Catholicism, drawing a distinction between private conversion versus public conversion. The article offers a defense of public conversion, arguing it explains the rationality of conversion and offers a solution to the problem of divine hiddenness. Using details from her own faith journey, Sullivan explores why God graces us with less perspicuous knowledge, causing subluminous conversions, as opposed to the more glaring, which leads to luminous conversions. Sullivan suggests that we obtain knowledge of God by loving one another, which takes place in the framework of the institutional Church. She subsequently uses this Church-making theodicy to offer five ideas about how we might engage the Church institutionally as Catholic philosophers.

The faith closet

This article is based upon research with student social workers and their educators which foregrounded the personal-professional interface in becoming a social worker. Faith was an explicit dimension of this research project insofar as an interest in spirituality and religion is returning to social work and insofar as the author has embarked upon her own inter-faith journey. It was also rather elusive insofar as faith-based students often construct a closet in which to conceal their faith in a predominantly secular world. The workings of the closet and the workings of faith are explored in relation to professional education, ethics and practice as well as research into these territories.

Discerning what God is doing among His People Today: A Personal Journal

This article begins with the personal faith journey of the author nurtured in Korean Pentecostalism. Christ is the best thing that can happen in life. The author’s faith journey becomes a missionary journey. It leads to the discovery that there are two types of mission: centred on ‘life after death’ (soul saving) and mission as struggle for ‘life before death’ (a just world). The next step is to realise that the two have to go together. The 20th-century mission has been marked by the World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh 1910 and the Pentecostal movement. The former has led to the ecumenical movement, which has truncated mission into the discussion on church unity. The missionary fervour of the Pentecostal movement has resulted in unprecedented expansion of Christianity in the global South but completely ignored Christian unity. Today we see signs of the two beginning to converge.