"Faith is reason grown courageous"
About this Quote
“Faith is reason grown courageous” tries to rescue faith from the usual showdown with logic by recasting it as logic’s next, riskier stage. Sherwood Eddy wasn’t just polishing a line for the page; he was a Protestant writer and activist shaped by the early 20th century’s collisions of modern science, industrial capitalism, world war, and missionary zeal. In that atmosphere, “faith” could look either like anti-intellectual retreat or like moral muscle. Eddy chooses the second.
The phrasing is doing quiet polemical work. “Reason” is the respectable currency of modernity, the thing educated people trust. By making faith reason’s offspring rather than its rival, Eddy dodges the stereotype of belief as superstition. Then he adds the hinge word: “courageous.” Courage implies danger, consequence, stakes. It suggests that reason alone can become a kind of safe, indoor virtue: correct, cautious, endlessly qualifying. Faith, in this framing, is what happens when analysis stops being a spectator sport and becomes a commitment that might cost you comfort, status, or certainty.
The subtext is also a rebuttal to both cynicism and passivity. If faith is “grown,” it’s cultivated, not inherited or coerced. If it’s courageous, it’s not mere assent to doctrine; it’s action under incomplete information. Eddy is effectively arguing for a faith compatible with modern skepticism but unwilling to let skepticism become an excuse to do nothing. In a century allergic to gullibility and haunted by catastrophe, he offers a belief system that wants to sound like adulthood, not escape.
The phrasing is doing quiet polemical work. “Reason” is the respectable currency of modernity, the thing educated people trust. By making faith reason’s offspring rather than its rival, Eddy dodges the stereotype of belief as superstition. Then he adds the hinge word: “courageous.” Courage implies danger, consequence, stakes. It suggests that reason alone can become a kind of safe, indoor virtue: correct, cautious, endlessly qualifying. Faith, in this framing, is what happens when analysis stops being a spectator sport and becomes a commitment that might cost you comfort, status, or certainty.
The subtext is also a rebuttal to both cynicism and passivity. If faith is “grown,” it’s cultivated, not inherited or coerced. If it’s courageous, it’s not mere assent to doctrine; it’s action under incomplete information. Eddy is effectively arguing for a faith compatible with modern skepticism but unwilling to let skepticism become an excuse to do nothing. In a century allergic to gullibility and haunted by catastrophe, he offers a belief system that wants to sound like adulthood, not escape.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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