THE BELIEVER

How does one confront the unknown and unknowable?

That is the central question in Krasnostein’s thoughtful meditation on humans’ desire for certainty, security, and solace. Describing herself as an educated, urbane, “secular humanist” Jew, the author is generous in her investigation of diverse individuals who share a common trait: “longing for the unattainable.” Her own search was ignited when she heard, by chance, a Mennonite choir singing at a Manhattan subway station. Transfixed by the sound and bond of community, she spent several months among Mennonites in the South Bronx, where she came to understand “their insistence on seeing a perfect pattern embroidered into the fabric of reality, constant confirmation—in the good and in the bad—of a loving presence.” Belief in that loving presence, in intelligent design, and in the Bible as historical fact has attracted some for whom scientific evidence is unconvincing. As to the existence of God, they refuse “to accept absence of evidence as evidence of absence.” At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the Director of Research is a geologist. “He demonstrates,” Krasnostein writes, “that it is possible simultaneously to consider Satan your personal spiritual adversary and to stay up to date with the Journal of Geology.” The author also talked to a lecturer on the book of Genesis who has a doctorate in microbiology and believes Noah’s Ark had room for young dinosaurs. A woman whose fiance disappeared on a solo flight after seeing unidentifiable lights in the sky; a man who clears haunted houses; an investigator into parapsychology: All find comfort in their “bespoke delusions.” Krasnostein herself is no stranger to terror, confusion, and pain: Some of her family members were victims of the Holocaust; her mother left her when she was 10 “with explanations I did not understand at the time and do not understand now.” Near the end, she writes, “I believe that we are united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that separate us.”

A sympathetic inquiry into the vicissitudes of faith.