Faith Along with hope and love, faith has been understood in the Christian tradition (following 1 Cor. 13:13) as a theological virtue: a settled disposition enabling one to move towards God by grace. As the young Augustine observes, without faith one would not believe there was anything to hope for; without hope one would despair of attaining the realities of which faith speaks; and without love one would not even desire to come to that goodness in which one had come to believe (Sol. 6.12). It is in this sense that the tradition has generally interpreted the most famous biblical statement about faith – as making present even now something of the reality to which one is journeying: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11:1).

Faith in the theological sense is thus only possible as a gift of God, for one cannot by oneself have natural certain knowledge or even right opinion of the divine realities which the teachings of faith seek to express. Classically, therefore, faith is considered according to two fundamental dimensions: it refers both to the beliefs or doctrines to which one assents (fides quae creditur), and also to the act of trust or adherence by means of which these beliefs are accepted as true (fides qua creditor, or, especially in the work of M. Luther, fiducia).

Taizé Community of The Community of Taizé is an ecumenical monastic community located in southern Burgundy between the historic centres of western monasticism: Cluny and Citeaux. It was founded in 1940 by Brother Roger (1915–2005). Deeply concerned with the division of Christians that he saw as a cause of tension and war in society, Brother Roger left the security of his native Switzerland (where he was a Reformed pastor) and settled, on his own, in the small village of Taizé. There he prayed three times a day and hid Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied France, bringing them safely to Switzerland. Forced to leave when the Gestapo invaded his house, he returned to Geneva where three other men joined him. The little community returned to Taizé in 1944 and quickly grew, attracting men from various Protestant denominations from throughout Europe. After Vatican Council II it was also possible for Catholics to join the Community. Today, the Community of Taizé is constituted of brothers from all mainline denominations and from all continents.

Early on, the Community developed a musically rich liturgy with the help of Father J. Gelineau, S. J. (1920–2008). Drawn by the beautiful liturgy and the novelty of a Protestant monastic community, the number of visitors steadily grew. The twelfth-century village church was soon too small and a larger church was built on the hill of Taizé – the Church of Reconciliation, which can hold up to 8,000 worshippers.

Oblation Derived from a Latin word for ‘offering’, ‘oblation’ has several meanings. In Catholic canon law it is used for anything given over to the use of the Church. In the more narrowly liturgical context of the mass, oblation refers to the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine, whether as brought in unconsecrated form to the altar during the offertory (the lesser oblation) or in their presentation after consecration (the greater oblation). Protestants generally restrict the use of oblation to the offertory, on the grounds that to designate the consecrated elements (in distinction from the unconsecrated bread and wine, as well as the monetary and other gifts brought forward in furtherance of the Church's ministry) as an oblation implies that in the celebration of the Eucharist the Church offers something to God rather than thankfully receiving what God offers it.

In the monastic context oblation refers to the medieval practice of dedicating children to religious life (cf. 1 Sam. 1:11, 22–8) by trusting them to the care of a monastery. Such children (known as oblates) were raised in the community until they were judged sufficiently mature to decide whether they wished to commit their lives to it by taking monastic vows. The reasons for dedicating children were varied, and often desperation (among the poor) and convenience or political calculation (among the rich) trumped religious motives.

Laity The Greek word laikos, from which the word ‘lay’ derives, does not occur in the Bible, although the noun laos, meaning ‘people’, is frequent, specifically designating the people of God as distinct from the Gentiles. Thus, the word laos properly refers to a sacred or consecrated people, distinct from a people who are not so consecrated. Several scholarly studies have shown that, although laikos is philologically related to laos, the use of the former term suggests that it refers to a further distinction within the people of God, according to which the laikos is opposed to the priest and Levite as one who is not consecrated for leadership in worship. In short, laikos designated a segment of the Christian population that were not leaders of the community and who exercised no cultic function. It referred to those who were not priests, deacons, or clerics.

Y. Congar (1904–95) argued that in 1 Peter the priestly themes and levitical ethic of the OT are carried over to the people of God as a whole (see, e.g., 1 Pet. 2:9). By contrast, Clement of Rome (fl. 95) is the first to contrast laikos to ‘priest’ (1Clem. 40:5), and uses the former term to refer to that part of the people which is neither priestly nor levitical; nevertheless, for him laikos refers to the non-priestly, non-levitical element among the holy people.

James, William The psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) is best known as a founder of the psychological–phenomenological study of individual religious experience and the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. In theological studies, James is best known for his books The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Following the publication of the former, James speculated that he should have titled it ‘the right to believe’. In it he rejected the widely accepted views of D. Hume (1711–76), I. Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel by choosing theism and the right or will to believe over absolutism, agnosticism, and determinism. James observed that for many persons religion is a ‘live option’ (defined as an unavoidable and significant choice, upon which a believer is willing to act) and defended the intellectual legitimacy of adopting a religious faith. In Varieties, he rejected objectivism and advocated a radically inclusive empiricism. He argued for the validity of sensory and religious experience and hypothesized that the human ‘subconscious’ functioned as a doorway between the ‘conscious self’ and ‘The More’ that, when open, allowed an individual to receive an experience of the ‘reality of the unseen’. For James, in both volumes, strict adherence to logical reason resulted in deterministic monistic systems, while reality – as it is shaped by free will – remains empirically pluralistic.