{"id":71603,"date":"2023-03-02T14:47:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-02T14:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/thought-for-the-day-what-does-having-faith-mean\/"},"modified":"2023-03-02T14:47:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-02T14:47:00","slug":"thought-for-the-day-what-does-having-faith-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/thought-for-the-day-what-does-having-faith-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought for the Day: What does having faith mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Fr Philip Blackledge asked the question \u2018What does having faith mean?\u2019 as he gave <\/strong><em><strong>Thought For The Day<\/strong><\/em><strong>\u00a0on BBC Radio Scotland this week.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The issue of whether someone can be a politician and have faith has been the subject of intense debate since the candidates for the leadership of the SNP were announced.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFaith is a small word that carries a lot of meanings,\u201d said the Rector of Holy Trinity Melrose. \u201cWe talk about \u2018people of faith\u2019, meaning religious people; \u2018having faith\u2019, meaning trusting people. We talk about being faithful or unfaithful to our partner or spouse. So what is faith?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs a priest, and someone who is often described as a person of faith, it&#8217;s not a word I find very helpful. It makes me feel as though faith is a thing, like something in my brain that non religious people don&#8217;t have, or like a box of opinions or beliefs that were given to me when I became a Christian. And that&#8217;s pretty much the opposite of my own faith.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPerhaps it is the fault of religious people. Sometimes, we say \u2018because of my faith\u2019 as a bit of a shorthand because it saves a long conversation. And people don&#8217;t generally want us to talk about our faith in public. But that can sometimes mean that people, in an attempt to respect a person of faith, don&#8217;t ask the sort of questions they would ask anyone else and so the reasons that people of faith hold views aren&#8217;t examined.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You can hear the full broadcast \u2013 along with Fr Blackledge\u2019s answer to the question of whether politicians can have faith \u2013 at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sounds\/play\/m001jjq6\">this link<\/a>. Thought for the Day begins at the 1:23:53 mark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fr Philip Blackledge asked the question \u2018What does having faith mean?\u2019 as he gave Thought For The Day\u00a0on BBC Radio Scotland this week. The issue of whether someone can be a politician and have faith has been the subject of intense debate since the candidates for the leadership of the SNP were announced. \u201cFaith is [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}