In a sweeping history, Jennifer Michael Hecht celebrates doubt as an engine of creativity and as an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty. Just as belief has its own history featuring people whose unique expressions of faith have forever changed the world, doubt has a vibrant story and tradition with its own saints, martyrs, and sages. Hecht blends her wide-ranging historical expertise, passionate admiration of the great doubters, and poet’s sensibility to tell a stimulating story that is part intellectual history and part showcase of ordinary people asking themselves the difficult questions that confront us all. Hecht views the history of doubt as not only a tradition of challenging accepted religious beliefs, including the existence of God, but also as a progression of attempts to make sense of life, the natural world, and the self, each on their own terms.
Dr. Jennifer Michael Hecht is an assistant professor of history at Nassau Community College. She is the author of The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France and The Next Ancient World, her book of poetry, which won the Poetry Society of America’s prestigious Norma Farber First Book Award for 2002, the Tupelo Prize, and ForeWord’s Poetry Book of the Year. Her book Doubt: A History is published by HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.
