Topic: Catholic Theology

Order Description
Please read Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, pages 116-136

Essay Prompt:

Write a modest essay (3 pages) to an age peer in which you explore a Catholic understanding of faith. This first essay will be evaluated on your appropriation of (A)
class material (What is Faith?), and (B) the few passages of Ratzinger, which have been cited in class. In asking you to write this essay, I am profoundly interested
in hearing your synthesis of this material and to hear your voice on this complex topic.

Definition of faith:

Faith may be defined as a supernatural gift that bestows upon the human person a confidence in the fundamental meaningfulness of existence, and that orients a person
towards the ultimate ground of all meaning and significance.

Some passages from Ratzinger:

1. Faith involves “abandonment of oneself to what we can neither make nor need to make, to the ground of the world as meaning, which first of all discloses to me the
freedom to make” (Ratzinger, 75). “Yet what happens here is not a blind surrender to the irrational. On the contrary, it is a movement towards the logos, the ratio,
towards meaning and so towards meaning and so towards truth itself, for in the final analysis the ground on which man takes his stand cannot possibly be anything else
but the truth revealing itself” (Ratzinger, 75).

2. Faith’s quest is asymptotic, in that the “truth of being itself eludes knowledge of the calculating variety” (Ratzinger, 76).

Topic: Catholic Theology

Order Description
Please read Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, pages 116-136

Essay Prompt:

Write a modest essay (3 pages) to an age peer in which you explore a Catholic understanding of faith. This first essay will be evaluated on your appropriation of (A)
class material (What is Faith?), and (B) the few passages of Ratzinger, which have been cited in class. In asking you to write this essay, I am profoundly interested
in hearing your synthesis of this material and to hear your voice on this complex topic.

Definition of faith:

Faith may be defined as a supernatural gift that bestows upon the human person a confidence in the fundamental meaningfulness of existence, and that orients a person
towards the ultimate ground of all meaning and significance.

Some passages from Ratzinger:

1. Faith involves “abandonment of oneself to what we can neither make nor need to make, to the ground of the world as meaning, which first of all discloses to me the
freedom to make” (Ratzinger, 75). “Yet what happens here is not a blind surrender to the irrational. On the contrary, it is a movement towards the logos, the ratio,
towards meaning and so towards meaning and so towards truth itself, for in the final analysis the ground on which man takes his stand cannot possibly be anything else
but the truth revealing itself” (Ratzinger, 75).

2. Faith’s quest is asymptotic, in that the “truth of being itself eludes knowledge of the calculating variety” (Ratzinger, 76).