Really listening to someone else's convictions in 'The Believer' by Sarah Krasnostein – KCCU

In the prologue to The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, The End, and Our Place in the Middle, Sarah Krasnostein tells us that what drove her to pursue the six profiles that follow was a need “to understand them, these people I found unfathomable, holding fast to faith in ideas that went against the grain of more accepted realities. It may be accurate to say that I needed to get closer to something, someone, that felt very far away.” The distance between Krasnostein, a journalist with a PhD in criminal law who identifies as fitting in “a secular humanist Jewish basket,” and her subjects — a Buddhist death doula, a group of ghost-hunting paranormalists, “PhD scientists” on staff at the Creation Museum (which promotes a literal interpretation of Genesis), a woman who served half her life in prison for her abusive husband’s murder, the fiancé of a disappeared pilot and the ufologists who claim to know what happened to him, and a Mennonite mission in the Bronx — initially seems vast, as do the distances among the subjects. What unites the six profiles is how these people cling to belief in things that cannot be empirically proved, what Krasnostein calls…
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