1 Faith “... all beliefs are acts of faith.” (Braidotti 2008: 11) Anna Hickey-Moody Faith is an ontological state, an orientation, and a capacity to act. It is a set of practices, an embedded emotional geography that choreographs subjectivities and communities. Philosophies of religion often account for transcendental frameworks, as a religion is a belief structure; however, faith is material, a capacity to act characterized by belief in the world. This essay puts forward a new materialist theory of faith as a cosmological, ontological condition. This project draws on resources from new materialist philosophy to think about what it might mean to have faith. I locate this perspective alongside a literature review of fairly contemporary philosophical work on religion, and a survey of recent work on material cultures of religion, so as to make quite distinct the kinds of contributions being made by a new materialist understanding of faith. The need for such a perspective is made plain to me on a daily basis through the empirical research I undertake for my Interfaith Childhoods (2016-2021) 1 research project. In this fieldwork I speak to religious and secular community members in Australia and Britain, all of whom have faith. For some of these research participants this faith begins with a faith in a God, or Gods, yet, for many others it doesn't; for them faith is about connectedness to community, family, values, places, and rituals. Faith is a way of being a person and belonging to a community. It is a capacity to act, or a set of embodied orientations that limit capacity to act. Having faith can increase, or alternatively decrease, a body's capacity to act. Faith can stop a person from connecting with another, can cause judgement, rejection, and create a “sharp edge” (Barad 2003: 803). Faith can also provide the capacity to reach out to others, to be there for others, to keep people going. Many people in my interfaith research tell stories of moving across worlds, living through wars, surviving change and separation from family, and their stories make clear the fact