Reflection Paper: My Spiritual Gifts

Have you ever had trouble finding faith in a difficult situation? In the book " Life as We Knew It" by Susan Pfeffer, the author portrays many different themes throughout the book. In the book, the theme is to always have faith and hope even in the hardest of times.

Faith is believing there is light when all one can see is darkness. Throughout Hamlet, Shakespeare uses belief as a guiding force for his characters. They are defined by their faith, or lack thereof, and their beliefs lead many of their actions. In this time period, so many people had horrible lives, faith in an afterlife was the only hope in which to keep living. The concept of an afterlife based on how one behaved in life is a defining characteristic of many religions, and Shakespeare uses this belief as the ultimate decision-maker in many character’s actions.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1: l, New International Version). This is where it all began. God’s perfect Creation included night and day, sky and land and sea, the moon and the stars, all the birds and fish and animals, and humankind. Man quickly messed it up and the Fall hit hard. No more was humanity right with God. But God loved his people so much that his Son, Jesus Christ came to earth to make them right with God by dying on the cross to wash away all of their sins, and through God’s grace, they received salvation and restored their heart relationship with God. In this paper, I will discuss within the context of the Christian worldview who God is, what

My definition of knowledge is a true fact or justified belief that is acquired through a

In Lara Buchak’s essay, Can It Be Rational to Have Faith?, she asserts that everyday faith statements and religious faith statements share the same attributes. She later states that in order to truly have faith, a person ceases to search for more evidence for their claim, and that having faith can be rational. Although she makes compelling arguments in favor of faith in God, this essay is more hearsay and assumption than actual fact. In this paper, you will see that looking for further evidence would constitute not having faith, but that having faith, at least in the religious sense, is irrational.

B: Australians are used to thinking that a journey is physical but they never think that the journey could be a spiritual one. In Jackie French’s 1993 novel, ‘Walking the Boundaries’ Martin, the main character, goes on a physical and spiritual journey where he learns about his family’s past and the importance of looking after the land.

How can extreme suffering change a person? Going through a German concentration camp causes many people to have life changing differences in their lives. Elie Wiesel tells his personal experience of going through a concentration camp in his book Night. He shares the horrific events that he, his father, and others had to experience. After going through so much, many people do not have the same mindset as they did before. Being tortured and watching others being tortured changes a person’s life, especially Elie’s, his father’s, Moshe the Beadle’s, and Rabbi Eliahou’s.

In his book The Promise Chaim Potok leads the reader on a heartbreaking journey full of spiritual conflict and decision. As a sequel to The Chosen, The Promise picks up with Reuven Malter, the main character and a Jewish man now in his mid-twenties, attending Hirsch University, a Jewish seminary in Brooklyn, New York. Reuven keeps his friendship with Danny Saunders, whom he met on a baseball field during his teenage years and later went to college with, even though they now go their separate ways as Reuven becomes a rabbi, and Danny practices psychology. During the summer Reuven dates Rachel Gordon, the niece of Abraham Gordon, a man excommunicated from the Jewish society, and meets Abraham’s son, Michael, a stubborn teen with a mental issue. Also, over the same summer Reuven’s father, David Malter, wrote a controversial book about the Talmud. These people along with Reuven’s ranting teacher, Rav Kalman, form the intricate web of conflicts and friendships in The Promise.

In the book, Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality, Mark McMinn commences by providing the groundwork for the Christian worldview about counseling. He indicates that the book is crucial for individuals interested in looking into the aspect of intra-disciplinary integration (McMinn, 1996). In his exploration of the intra-disciplinary integration frontier, McMinn (1996) focuses on the challenges that Christian counselors face in their practice. As McMinn (1996) discusses the aspect of integration, he disregards religious interventions as well as foundational perspectives, indicating that they might not apply to the identified frontier. An individual’s spiritual discipline and his or her theological and biblical foundations are essential

The novel Night by Elie Wiesel, which was first published in 1958, tells a great first-hand account of a terrible event named the Holocaust. In this story, it gives a detailed memoir of a young kid named Eliezar who has to endure this appalling crisis. As the Holocaust continues to go on around them, he and his family remain optimistic about their future. Even though they were optimistic, the Holocaust finally closes in on them. Once this occurs they were pulled away from their homeland and relocated to their designated site where they were split by gender. All throughout the novel, Eliezar and his father stay together through the unfortunate events occurring around them. For this father and son duo to stay together it takes an insurmountable amount of faith to pull through this tragedy together.

The Ultimate Concern, is Faith, according to Paul Tillich. This redefines the normal definition of faith which is basically credulity. Doubt is essential to this concept of faith because it constantly focuses the faithful person to consider whether or not our ultimate concern is, in fact, the highest that it can be. We can be mistaken in our faith in one very important way: objectification. It becomes a talisman with power over the believer, rather than the believer having the authority over the end. The sort of God that can be turned into a talisman looks a bit like this, as Tillich writes in his Courage to Be:

C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christ, like I believe in the sun- not because I can see it, but by it I can see everything else.” I have used this quote as a guide for myself throughout my journey to finding the Lord. Putting my faith into someone “intangible” and having faith in Christ has not been an easy task for me, given I was not raised in an extremely religious household. However, I was about fourteen when I discovered God’s word, felt my heart swell with happiness, and fell in love with Christ. That day changed my life entirely, and completely changed my outlook of the world.

Symbolism, self-explanatory, something serving as a symbol. In the short story, Young Goodman Brown, symbolism is shown by the wife’s name, Faith, and the pink bow that Faith wears in her hair, and the snake staff. These three things have odd ways of being symbolic but this essay is going to break it down.

Now faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. In the stories The Song of Roland and Dante’s Inferno both main character’s faith was tested on their spiritual quest to salvation. Roland was betrayed and outnumbered by his enemies and Dante was lost in the darkness of sin. As each man faced difficult situations on their missions, both relied on their faith to overcome their enemy, persevered through obstacles and refused to turn back. Although Roland and Dante journeys were completely different, their values in what they believed in were the same.

“Fides ET ratio” which was written in 1998 by Pope St. John Paul the II to all the bishops to demonstrate the relationship between faith and reason. Pope St. John Paul the II wrote the encyclical to support and at the same time help the old Christian philosophy. "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come to the fullness of the truth about themselves" (n. 1) With that sentence Pope St. John Paul the II begins the encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Pope St. John Paul II believed that faith and reason has a lot of interconnection to help