In the course of grieving for my father and glorying in my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they once had. I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks.

While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.Īfter earning her Ph.D. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. The rush of events in a single dramatic week plays out Cass's conviction that the religious impulse spills out into life at large. But he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry.

He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum-the goddess of game theory-and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. He's been dubbed the atheist with a soul, and his sudden celebrity has upended his life. Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind.Īt the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller.

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