Brian asked:

What is the connection between faith and hope?

and Sara asked:

Faith and hope are my two favorite virtues. Faith is believing in something unconditionally without a
need for proof of it's existence. Hope is the feeling that everything will turn out for the best after doing
everything in your ability to the point of impeccability! Once you live with hope in your life, you have
every right to have faith that things will, in fact turn out for the best! A very strong connection?

and Floradel asked:

Isn't the connection between faith and hope is that if a certain person have faith certainly he has
hope. If he don't have faith then he have no hope.

============

Perhaps in everyday language very little. To say, I hope it will rain tomorrow, or, I have faith that it will
rain tomorrow, will in neither case necessarily produce rain. But, oddly enough, I will feel, and seem
to others, to be a bigger fool if I have expressed faith rather than hope, and in the event that rain does
not materialise. We could also say that hope is a wish, but faith is a belief; in fact, faith is often
defined as a firmbelief, or something a bit stronger than an ordinary belief.

Faith, it would seem, gains its major use in a religious context. To put our faith in God seems to be a
stronger act than putting hope in God. In religious language faith seems to imply mystic connotations,
whereas hope remains a more mundane expression. One example of the positive sense of faith, as
opposed to the more neutral sense of hope, is seen in the statement, "I have faith in the fact that
Jesus will one day return." To say, "I hope that it is a fact that Jesus will one day return," is obviously
not the same statement.

Paul, in the New Testament, refers to the "shield of faith." Faith in Christ is, therefore, a protection
against evil. To declare hope in Christ is not quite the same. Also, to have faith in someone or
something and to be let down, seems far more tragic than to be disappointed in one's hopes not
being fulfilled.

Not only religious people but others, can claim faith to be a greater certainty than hope by excluding a
time limit. Much more confidence is placed in the statement, "I have great faith that the world will
become a better place before I die," than, "I have great faith that the world will become a better place
before next Wednesday." But we could confidently , "I hope that the world will become a better place
before next Wednesday," because there is no real commitment, it is just a hope. We could respond to
someone who says, "I hope to win the lottery before long," by saying, "So do I." But we would hesitate
to respond in the same way to someone who said that they had faith that they would win the lottery
before long.

To sum up, hope and faith are two different concepts.

John Brandon