BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

“I have enjoyed immensely Jennifer Hecht's romp --light-hearted but serious -- though the history of one profoundly important idea -- doubt. She brings to life an awesome array of figures in philosophy, science, and literature, in a way that is wonderfully engaging.”

— Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

“Doubt: A History, is a bold and brilliant work and (lucky us) highly readable, thanks to the elegant and witty author. It's the World Religions course you wish you'd had in college, a history of faith told from the outside. Jennifer Michael Hecht is a strong swimmer in deep water against treacherous currents.”

— Garrison Keillor, host of The Writer's Almanac and A Prairie Home Companion, MPR

You can listen to Jennifer Michael Hecht talking about the importance of doubt.

We don't find fault with any faith, unless it preaches violence and hate. It's hard enough to make it through life, and we understand that belief in an external God is necessary for most people to make it from birth through death.

But doubt is often what moves the world to innovation and advancement. In many ways absolute faith based on literal interpretations of "divine" texts (beyond the desire of most right wing nutters to "return America to a white Christian country") is indeed a conservative force; it opposes change. That's a bit of a problem for a nation that has grown and thrived on dynamic inquiry and invention -- and is one of the reasons we hit the wall during the years of "Reagan conservatism."

A flexible faith and doubt can co-exist, perhaps creating the most powerful spiritual and creative forces when combined.

If Rush Limbaugh speaks for those Americans who look nostalgically to a Disneyland America that never really existed, he speaks for those who want us to become stultified as the world around us moves forward. Doubt trumps "conservative faith" when it comes to economic successs and technological innovation.

This 576-page book is a dandy account of the importance of skpeticism and doubt in creating the great leaps forward of enlightenment.

"Doubt" was published around the time Bush was being "re-elected," but is still going strong in sales.

Of course when you come to a conclusion as a result of skepticism, the first thing you need to do is doubt it.

From Publishers Weekly:

Cited midway through this magisterial book by Hecht (The End of the Soul), the Zen maxim "Great Doubt: great awakening. Little Doubt: little awakening. No Doubt: no awakening" reveals that skepticism is the sine qua non of reflection, and discloses the centrality that doubt and disbelief have played in fueling intellectual discovery. Most scholarship focuses on the belief systems that have defined religious history while leaving doubters burnt along the wayside. Hecht's poetical prose beautifully dramatizes the struggle between belief and denial, in terms of historical currents and individual wrestlings with the angel. Doubt is revealed to be the subtle stirring that has precipitated many of the more widely remembered innovations in politics, religion and science, such as medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides's doubt of Ptolemaic cosmology 200-300 years before Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo.

The breadth of this work is stunning in its coverage of nearly all extant written history. Hecht's exegesis traces doubt's meandering path from the fragments of pre-Socratics and early religious heretics in Asia, carefully elucidating the evolution of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, through the intermingling of Eastern and Western religious and philosophical thought in the Middle Ages that is often left out of popular histories, to the preeminence of doubt in thrusting open the doors of modernity with the Cartesian "I am a thing... that doubts," ergo sum. Writing with acute sensitivity, Hecht draws the reader toward personal reflection on some of the most timeless questions ever posed.

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