36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein Page A

Lipkin.”
    “Well, this
has
been fun,” Lucinda said to Cass as they were both standing, waiting for their row to clear out so that they could proceed. Did she mean merely Lipkin’s talk or the communion between them? Her eyes were scanning the crowd. “Are you going to that dinner for Lipkin?” she asked without really looking at him.
    “No, I didn’t sign up.”
    Cass rarely put his name on the sign-up sheets that had slots for ten faculty members and four graduate students to entertain the speaker at one of the local restaurants that had sprouted up along the formerly decrepit and now almost hip Maudlin Street. With the inflated property values of Cambridge and Boston driving chefs to outlying areas, Weedham, Massachusetts, was enjoying a restaurant renaissance, trendy little spots blossoming amid the blight.
    “Well, then, I guess I’ll see you soon,” and she turned away, apologetically squeezing past the colleagues over whom she’d just recently stepped. Cass stood there watching her as she strode up to the podium. She and Lipkin shook hands cordially, even enthusiastically. Lucinda was smiling broadly as she spoke to him, and he was laughing as he answered her. There were obviously no hard feelings between these MVPs.
    Cass watched for a while, his head cocked and his crooked smile in place, until everybody started heading out to the reception, lining up behind Lipkin and Lucinda like retinue behind royalty. Cass skipped the reception, and went home happy, chewing over it all. It wasn’t so much food for thought. It was ambrosia.
    He saw Lucinda Mandelbaum two days later, at a university building where faculty meetings were held. She was standing next to Sebastian Held, both of them tanking up on caffeine in the few minutes before the meeting began.
    Cass hated faculty meetings and skipped as many as he could get away with. Watching his colleagues’ intense engagement in the proceedings, the eloquence and pedantry slathered on points too minute for any but the best-trained minds to discern, he would be overtaken by his own failure to grasp human nature. But today he had looked forward to coming.
    Lucinda, dressed in a pair of tailored black slacks and a pale-gray sweater matching the color of her eyes, seemed deep in conversation with Sebastian Held, but Cass strode right over and greeted them both enthusiastically.
    “Hello,” Lucinda had said, smiling back at him with formally polite blankness, reaching out her hand to shake his with a briskly firm shake. “Lucinda Mandelbaum.”
    “Yes, of course. I’m Cass. Cass Seltzer.”
    “Nice to meet you, Cass.”
    “Oh, we’ve already met,” he said, stopping himself before he could wail out his dismay: Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how we laughed together like careless gods?
    “Oh, sorry. I’m terrible with faces. Remind me of what you do?”
    “Psychology of religion.”
    “Psychology of religion?” Her thin upper lip curled slightly, not quite achieving a smile. “As a branch of abnormal psychology? Or are you one of those people who try to offer an evolutionary explanation for group madness?”
    “Well, not exactly. What interests me more is the phenomenology of religion in all its varieties. What does it feel like from the inside? What sorts of terrors does it address, and what sorts of emotional growth does it both block and enhance? And how does the religious response manifest itself, even in ways that may not seem religious?”
    Her lip curled a bit more, and it was a smile, and she lifted her chin so that her throat was exposed.
    “It must be frustrating to deal with irrationality.”
    “How can one be a psychologist and not deal with irrationality?”
    “If I thought that were true, I’d never have gone near the field.”
    “Well, I guess it’s a good thing for the field, then, that you don’t think it’s true.”
    “But is it a good thing for the field that you do?”
    Cass studied her face, which seemed both