front cover of Against Dogmatism
Against Dogmatism
Dwelling in Faith and Doubt
Madhuri Yadlapati
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As Madhuri M. Yadlapati demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, Yadlapati explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. She begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows her focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence.

Yadlapati traces religious perspectives on trust, humility, belonging, commitment, and lively skepticism as they relate to faith and doubt. Drawing on various doctrines, scriptures, and the writings of great religious thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Raimon Panikkar, Yadlapati demonstrates how doubt can serve to enhance faith, not hinder it. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, Against Dogmatism reveals an ecumenical middle way, a spiritual approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.

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Art in Doubt
Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds
Tatyana Gershkovich
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Leo Tolstoy’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s radically opposed aesthetic worldviews emanate from a shared intuition—that approaching a text skeptically is easy, but trusting it is hard
 
Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition—Tolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aesthete—seem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private and impossible to share through art.
 
Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds reconceives the pair’s celebrated fiction and contentious theorizing as coherent, lifelong efforts to reckon with the problem of other people’s minds. Gershkovich demonstrates how the authors’ shared yearning for an impossibly intimate knowledge of others formed and deformed their fiction and brought them through parallel logic to their rival late styles: Tolstoy’s rustic simplicity and Nabokov’s baroque complexity. Unlike those authors for whom the skeptical predicament ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that skepticism can be overcome, not by force of will but with the right kind of text, one designed to withstand our impulse to doubt it. Through close readings of key canonical works—Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murat, The Gift, Pale Fire—this book brings the twin titans of Russian fiction to bear on contemporary debates about how we read now, and how we ought to.

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The Birth of Doubt
Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature
Moshe Halbertal
SBL Press, 2020

A systematic attempt to understand the rabbinic world through its approach to confronting uncertainty

In the history of halakhah, the treatment of uncertainty became one of the most complex fields of intense study. In his latest book, Moshe Halbertal focuses on examining the point of origin of the study of uncertainty in early rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim. Halbertal explores instructions concerning how to behave in situations of uncertainty ranging from matters of ritual purity, to lineage and marriage, to monetary law, and to the laws of forbidden foods. This examination of the rules of uncertainty introduced in early rabbinic literature reveals that these rules were not aimed at avoiding but rather at dwelling in the midst of uncertainty, thus rejecting the sectarian isolationism that sought to minimize a community’s experience of and friction with uncertainty.

Features:

  • A thorough investigation of the principles concerning how to behave in cases of uncertainty
  • An examination of two distinct modes for coping with uncertainty
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The Book of Doubt
Tessa de Loo
Haus Publishing, 2011
Even though he is the son of a Dutch mother, Saeed has a Moroccan first name in memory of the virtuoso oud player his mother fell in love with twenty years ago. When she found out she was pregnant, he ran off and returned to Morocco. Saeed decides to look for his father, in the hope of finding a new identity in a new world. His childhood friend Hassan accompanies him. Back then they shared an imaginary land which they both ruled. Now they only have one starting point: a grocery shop in Fez. From there they follow the trail of the oud player, who leads them from the cedar woods of Ifrane to the red dunes of the desert to the high Atlas, where Kasbahs are locked in a losing battle with decay. Saeed's search sends him deeper into disillusionment and into the arms of Islam, where he tries to find something to hold on to. But there is a disturbing presence. A seemingly fictitious character from their imaginary past infiltrates Saeed's quest. While Saeed desperately tries to get rid of him, different aspects of his life, more and more beyond his control, reach an apotheosis resulting in one final deed affecting man and beast alike.
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front cover of Conceived in Doubt
Conceived in Doubt
Religion and Politics in the New American Nation
Amanda Porterfield
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition—and in spite of evangelicalism’s more authoritarian and reactionary aspects.

In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism’s relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity.

As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.

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Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia
Victoria Frede
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The autocratic rule of both tsar and church in imperial Russia gave rise not only to a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century but also to a crisis of meaning among members of the intelligentsia. Personal faith became the subject of intense scrutiny as individuals debated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, debates reflected in the best-known novels of the day. Friendships were formed and broken in exchanges over the status of the eternal. The salvation of the entire country, not just of each individual, seemed to depend on the answers to questions about belief.
    Victoria Frede looks at how and why atheism took on such importance among several generations of Russian intellectuals from the 1820s to the 1860s, drawing on meticulous and extensive research of both published and archival documents, including letters, poetry, philosophical tracts, police files, fiction, and literary criticism. She argues that young Russians were less concerned about theology and the Bible than they were about the moral, political, and social status of the individual person. They sought to maintain their integrity against the pressures exerted by an autocratic state and rigidly hierarchical society. As individuals sought to shape their own destinies and searched for truths that would give meaning to their lives, they came to question the legitimacy both of the tsar and of Russia’s highest authority, God.

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Doubt, Time, Violence
Piotr Hoffman
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this work of original philosophy, Piotr Hoffman focuses on two of the central concerns of modern philosophy—doubt and time. He argues that both concerns stem from a suppressed but underlying feeling that life is an all-out, unrestrained struggle and that violence is inherent in the human condition.

According to Hoffman, modern philosophy becomes fully intelligible and coherent only when the notion of human violence is given paramount importance. After briefly pointing out some significant parallels between Hobbes and Descartes, Hoffman undertakes a careful examination of ideas about doubt and time in the works of Descartes and Hegel, and, above all, in Heidegger's Being and Time. In a chapter on doubt, Hoffman shows that the skeptical predicament into which man is placed by Descartes's "evil demon" and Heidegger's "death" is grounded in the notion of complete vulnerability to an "other," a vulnerability revealed only in violent confrontation. Hoffman then compares Hegel's and Heidegger's views on time, showing that they presuppose the possibility of viewing the present as a complete break with the past. This possibility is again grounded in the experience of violent struggle with another human being. Hoffman concludes by linking philosophical concepts of doubt and time to ordinary experience.

A lucid, intelligent, and persuasive work, firmly grounded in the texts it considers, Doubt, Time, Violence will challenge philosophers and interest all who ponder the significance of violence.
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Faith and Doubt as Partners in Mormon History
Gregory A. Prince
Utah State University Press, 2014

Volume 19, The Leonard J. Arrington Lecture Series

The Special Collections and Archives of Utah State University's Merrill-Cazier Library houses the personal and historical collection of Leonard J. Arrington, renowned scholar of the American West.

The Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture annually hosts the presentation of current research by a leading scholar. Among the lecturers have been such notable historians as Thomas G. Alexander, Richard L. Bushman, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Howard Lamar, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

 

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Futures after Progress
Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore
Chloe Ahmann
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A powerful ethnographic study of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures.

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.
 
Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.
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In Doubt
The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process
Dan Simon
Harvard University Press, 2012

The criminal justice process is unavoidably human. Police detectives, witnesses, suspects, and victims shape the course of investigations, while prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, and judges affect the outcome of adjudication. In this sweeping review of psychological research, Dan Simon shows how flawed investigations can produce erroneous evidence and why well-meaning juries send innocent people to prison and set the guilty free.

The investigator’s task is genuinely difficult and prone to bias. This often leads investigators to draw faulty conclusions, assess suspects’ truthfulness incorrectly, and conduct coercive interrogations that can lead to false confessions. Eyewitnesses’ identification of perpetrators and detailed recollections of criminal events rely on cognitive processes that are often mistaken and can easily be skewed by the investigative procedures used. In the courtroom, jurors and judges are ill-equipped to assess the accuracy of testimony, especially in the face of the heavy-handed rhetoric and strong emotions that crimes arouse.

Simon offers an array of feasible ways to improve the accuracy of criminal investigations and trials. While the limitations of human cognition will always be an obstacle, these reforms can enhance the criminal justice system’s ability to decide correctly whom to release and whom to punish.

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Pop When the World Falls Apart
Music in the Shadow of Doubt
Eric Weisbard, ed.
Duke University Press, 2012
Hearing Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan once said, was “like busting out of jail.” But what happens when popular music isn’t as simple as rock-and-roll rebellion? How does pop respond to such events as a decade-long war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina? In Pop When the World Falls Apart, a diverse array of music writers, scholars, and enthusiasts reflect on popular music’s role—as commentary, as refuge, and as rallying cry—in times of military conflict, social upheaval, and cultural crisis.

Drawn from presentations at the annual Experience Music Project Pop Conference—hailed by Robert Christgau as “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music”—the essays in this book include inquiries into the sonic dimension of war in Iraq; the cultural life of jazz in post-Katrina New Orleans; Isaac Hayes’s reappropriation of a country song, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” as a symbol of black nationalism; and punk rock pranks played on record execs looking for the next big thing in central Virginia. Offering a diverse range of voices, perspectives, and approaches, this volume mirrors the eclecticism of pop itself.

Contributors: Larry Blumenfeld , Austin Bunn, Nate Chinen, J. Martin Daughtry, Brian Goedde, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Jonathan Lethem, Eric Lott, Kembrew McLeod, Elena Passarello, Diane Pecknold, David Ritz, Carlo Rotella, Scott Seward, Tom Smucker, Greg Tate, Karen Tongson, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Oliver Wang, Eric Weisbard, Carl Wilson

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Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark
Austin Busch
SBL Press, 2022

Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark traces the literary dynamics and explores the theological dimensions of the Gospel of Mark’s thematization of skepticism regarding resurrection. In every place where it seems to depict resurrection—Jesus's and others'—Mark evades the issue of whether resurrection actually occurs. Austin Busch argues that, despite Mark's abbreviated and ambiguous conclusion, this gospel does not downplay resurrection but rather foregrounds it, imagining Jesus’s death and restoration to life as a divine plot to overcome Satan through cunning deception. Risen Indeed? constitutes a careful literary reading of Mark's Gospel, as well as an assessment of Mark's impact on the traditions of Christian literature and theology that emerged in its wake.

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Shadows of Doubt
Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
Harvard University Press, 2019

Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system.

If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined.

Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.”

Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

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Unbelievers
An Emotional History of Doubt
Alec Ryrie
Harvard University Press, 2019

“How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.”
—Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age

Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, pointing to science and reason as the twin culprits, but in this lively, startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through the heart more than the mind.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, he shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. As Protestant radicals eroded time-honored certainties and ushered in an age of anger and anxiety, some defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics, setting in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious times.

“Well-researched and thought-provoking…Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.”
Christianity Today

“A beautifully crafted history of early doubt…Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.”
The Spectator

“Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like…John Donne to grapple with church dogma.”
New Yorker

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