We examine the contribution of skeptics, cynics, and others who have followed the human impulse to challenge given wisdom, and to doubt. Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht has published a sweeping, lyrical history of the world's great doubters, and she shows that the act of questioning, as much as the act of believing, has changed the world.
The joy of creating this program lies, in part, in having my own imagination about "faith" expanded. This week, Jennifer Michael Hecht provides a luminous account of how our common imagination about doubt, and its symbiotic relationship with faith, begs for investigation.
Hecht's subject matter, the history of doubt, is daunting. She defines doubt generously, broadly addressing the human impulse to question what is given in order to invest one's days with meaning. She counts Socrates and Jesus, Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, among history's great doubters. She loves the ideas her work examines, and recounts their origins and the individuals who championed them as though she is recalling the adventures of friends:
You have to be a little bold and a little brave in most periods of time to be a doubter. And I liked them. I also was surprised by them because the dominant history basically suggests that doubt is very modern and that we have few doubters in the ancient world, but I kept seeing it everywhere. And so I just wanted to tell that story, to sketch it out. I found it was much more cohesive and self-knowing than I had ever dreamed.
How many Christians would acknowledge that there is a symbiotic relationship between faith and doubt?
1 comment:
Great read, thanks
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