Editorial:

‘Faith’ in fact is such a strange word today, let alone ‘religious faith’.  Strange, since despite its ubiquity,  the word seems to have lost its vigour and credence. Perhaps this is on the one hand due to the violent excesses of  religious faith, and on the other, related to the pretension of modern scientific rationality to be neutral -as if it has nothing to do with any sort of faith whatsoever.

Faith -in its broad sense-, however, is inevitable. The foundation of any kind of expalanatory system cannot be other than a certain kind of faith, a faith in something. This faith or the basic belief may be called ‘postulate’, ‘presopposition’ or  even ‘rationality’  (an ultimate believe in the power of reason). In the predominance of modern scientific knowledge,  the faith in reason is indeed the most basic.  To this extent even religious faith is to be justified and rethought  again and again in terms of  reason.

Melintas of this issue discusses  the position of Christianity as a particular kind of faith in the changing circumstances,  the position of  faith in general within the framework of  rationality, the faith in the authenticity of the revelatory truth, and finally the faith in personal as well as collective memory  within the course of history.

Last but not least, there is an important practical note concerning Melintas of the previous issue. We sincerely regret an omission in the previous issue: we did not mention that Henk Oosterling’s essay “Dasein as Design, Or: Must Design Save the World” (Volume 24, no.1, April 2009) was made available to us by Premsela. Dutch Philosopher Henk Oosterling gave a public lecture titled “Dasein as Design,” and Premsela organized this lecture at 1 April 2009. Premsela is a Dutch platform for design and fashion (www.premsela.org). Laura Martz has translated Oosterling’s essay and Premsela gave Melintas permission to publish this essay. Hereby we offer our sincere apology to Premsela for the omission.

E d i t o r