Author of the week: Barbara Bradley Hagerty

last updated 8 January 2015

Like millions of other people, Barbara Bradley Hagerty once had a life-changing spiritual experience, said Amy Sullivan in Time.com. But Hagerty happens to be a National Public Radio correspondent, so when she sat down to write about God, she worried what skeptical colleagues would think of her. Her big moment happened 14 years ago, when Hagerty was interviewing a churchgoer under the circular glow of a lamppost. “The moment itself is hard to describe,’’ she says. “It’s as if someone stood on the edge of the circle and was breathing on us.” The other woman stopped talking midsentence. “There was the presence of something else that was spiritual around us,” Hagerty says. The feeling retreated like a wave, but left Hagerty curious to know how science explained such happenings. Writing a book on the topic, she says, was her attempt “to find out whether I was crazy or not.”

The answers she arrives at in Fingerprints of God are likely to please neither evangelicals nor committed secularists, said Gregory M. Lamb in The Christian Science Monitor. Noting that half of Americans can also point to a transformation spiritual moment, Hagerty talks to scientists who trace such occurrences to simple brain chemistry; she consults a few who are studying whether the triggering force might sometimes reside “beyond this material world.” Her hunch is that the believers are on to something. “Belief in God has not gone away,” she says, “because people keep encountering Him, in unexplainable, intensely spiritual moments.”