We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers.
It's difficult and stubborn.
It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas.
It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it.
And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith.
I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary.
I'm not convinced of this. I can hardly say I believe it.
I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence. Because despair is self-fulfilling.
If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so.
And I, for one, refuse to live that way.