Kelly Wallace
January 22, 2015
Encountering Mystery
Dr. McNally
Paper Two: Difference between Mystery and Problem
Throughout our short time in the course so far there has been a prevalent discussion of mystery: what is it?, how do we define it?, and what all falls under the category of mystery over problem. To begin I’d separate the two much how we separated them in class. A problem is something you don’t know the answer too but you know that there is an answer. Yet a mystery has no guaranteed answer and can have both negative and positive connotations.
In the text: Sacred Space: an Aesthetic for liturgical environment, Mircea Elidea was quoted to have said “no religious experience without intervention of senses” I find this to be an interesting quote when it comes to the thought of mystery verses problem because in so many ways faith is a mystery it is something not totally comprehensible to us a human forms. We feel the need to have an answer to so many things. For example, the creation of Earth scientist were unsure but then they solved that problem for the big band theory, and then discovered evolution, thus was a solution to the problem for what they did not know the answer too. They research and found a way to prove it themselves. Yet, for people of faith they people in the seven days of creations, in Adam and Eve and how all are descendants of the original humans that god brought to the Garden of Eden. It is a mystery but it is what is practiced in the Christian