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But let me begin by taking a step back and introducing a broader question.

How does the life of the mind relate to the life of faith? Can everyone hear me, by the way? Am I projecting it?

Yeah.

I imagine that there will be few in this audience for whom, in one way or another, this is not a live question.

I first felt the issue acutely, this question of the relation of the life of the mind to the life of faith

in a parish confirmation class at the age of 14. The boy whose role it was to be the class smart

Alec one week asked the nun who was teaching us, but how do we know that it's true? I can't remember which particular week it was,

or what precisely the it he was referring to was.

But what I remember pretty sharply was the response.

Faith is a gift, the teacher answered,

and if you don't take care of it, you may lose it.

I don't think what she said, considered as an abstract proposition, was false,

but what she seemed to be communicating by making that statement in that context,

what I think the philosopher Grice would call the conversational implicature.

I've always liked that phrase. What she was

communicated by saying that in that context was a little terrifying. Keep asking those questions,

young Ernie was the underlying message, and you'll be going to hell. Quite a severe way to

deal with an irritating adolescent. I don't know what Ernie made of it,

...