Yesterday I was privileged to have a conversation with a young woman whose faith is very important to her.\u00a0 It is inspiring to me to see such faith in young people. She is currently doing an internship and we were talking about the work environment in which finds herself.\u00a0 It isn’t easy to find a workplace that values our Catholic beliefs.<\/p>\n
She spoke about a person who told her he\u00a0didn’t understand how she could be a person of faith and a critical thinker.\u00a0 To this person faith calls people to blind obedience.\u00a0They figured Christians believed just because God said so and we didn’t think for ourselves.\u00a0 People who think like this reject faith in favor of critical thinking.<\/p>\n
Our faith in no way rejects critical thinking.\u00a0 Proverbs 4:5 <\/a>tells us to “get wisdom, get understanding.”\u00a0 Not only does our church not reject reason, it sees the ability to reason as a gift from God.\u00a0 The gift of reason is part of what distinguishes us from other creatures in God’s creation.<\/p>\n God created us with a desire to learn.\u00a0 Since the beginning of time, the scope of human knowledge has grown exponentially fueled by this desire to learn.\u00a0 Yet what we know today is nothing compared to the knowledge that God has.<\/p>\n We have a God whose love for us is absolute and we can trust that anything God reveals to us is good but we can use the gift of reason to learn more about faith so that we better understand our faith.\u00a0 This in turn gives us the ability to make decisions on how we apply our faith to situations today.\u00a0 The most recent books in the Bible were written 2,000 years ago.\u00a0 It is through the gift of reason and the Holy Spirit that we make decisions on how the Bible applies to our lives today.<\/p>\n