“She tweets. She’s green. She’s media savvy. She’s animated.”

She has a Smart Car. She knows all the right buzz words to achieve MSM approval.

Oh, and she leavens it with tedious LibProtSpeak:

“For me the word ‘faith’ is part of a new paradigm … the word belief sounds too static, where in fact in faith we are invited to participate relationally.” In other words, she said, “belief is a noun and faith is a verb.”

Can anyone even tell me what that means?

As near as I can tell such statements have two basic functions:

1. Acoustic stimuli reduction. That is, “faith” is easier on the ear than the harder edged word “belief”. It’s a principle the Prophet Chesterton noticed nearly a century ago:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, ‘I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.’ My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

Ms. Tindal appears to fear that words like “belief” affect MSM journalists (especially Canadian ones) like a pistol shot, so she opts for the word “faith” and then softens the effect still further by announcing it is a verb. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Making “faith” a verb is a way of making the Faith purely subjective. As a DRE I once knew was bent on saying everytime he could, “We are a faithing community” (don’t forget to pronounce the “th” softly as in “that”). “Faithing”. What a harmless word, from a harmless community that would never dream of bringing its subjective fantasies into the real world except in ways thorough acceptable to the Canadian Journalistic Community. My old DRE usually couple proclamations of our existence as a “faithing community” with the Caring and Sharing Exegesis of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and some sort of “We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for” message of self-empowerment. That’s because the ultimate point of making “Faith” a verb and striking out all that stiff stuff about “beliefs” (aka “doctrines”) is to say that the Faith is purely subjective, not our response to the revelation of Almighty God who has invaded the kingdom of sin, hell and death and defeated the devil by his passion, death, and resurrection. If “belief” effect such people as Tindal like pistol shot, that declaration is like machine gun fire. Very nerve-wracking.