The Power of Identity

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The Buddha answered when people asked about after life. He said, that's like asking where the flame goes after we blow it out to the east or west. Why shouldn't your honest encounter with the Abrahamic tradition be as valid as any made by interpreters of the past? The fact that there's an and makes every step in between now and then more meaningful. That is what we argue because we're stuck with death.

We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, oﬃcial archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live ― in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.

So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still oﬀer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht in her new book, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives, is in poetry.

Shermer and Hecht discuss: awe and wonder • science and religion • the new atheists • humanism and atheism • secular Judaism • replacing religion, with what? • the original meaning of liturgy and why it’s still important • rituals for atheists • how to cope with loss, death, and grief • what to say at weddings and funerals • Alvy’s Error (the universe is expanding but Brooklyn is not) • what we do in the hear-and-now matters, whether or not there is a hereafter (which there probably isn’t) • love.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, a historian and poet, is the award-winning and bestselling author of the histories Doubt, Stay, The Happiness Myth, and The End of the Soul. Her poetry books include Who Said, The Next Ancient World, and Funny. She earned her PhD in history from Columbia University and teaches in New York City. Her new book is The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives.