ABSTRACT
For Premawardhana in his chapter on Faith and the Existential, “living existentially involves profound commitments and pledges to an Other, whether human or divine.” If the problem of “faith,” then, like “care,” is at the core of an existential approach to human reality, the issue is to “turn attention from cognitive operations of the mind to existential commitments of the heart.” He reminds us that “credo,” “I believe,” is derived from “cor, cordis,” heart—hence where I cannot “know,” I rather “place my heart.” To understand faith phenomenologically and existentially is, then, to describe the experiential possibility of trust and faith in another rather than to reduce religion to its cognitive grammar. He notes how phenomenological approaches to religion have been subjected to a historicizing critique, but how, in turn, more recent perspectives emphasizing religious experience over religious discourse have returned existential themes to the fore: “faith acknowledges the relationality and vulnerability that characterize human experiences of alterity.”
