In Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants, faith is an ongoing effort for Hannah Fisher, who keeps trying to understand how God can be both loving and capable of destruction. The book traces her journey of losing and then regaining her faith, highlighting how her simple devotion erodes as loss overtakes her life. Initially, Hannah sees each blow as a divine test, but repeated tragedy pushes her toward anger and questions about forgiveness. Her path over the course of the novel illustrated the novel’s assertion that a rebuilt faith grows out of doubt and grief instead of calm certainty.

As the story begins, Hannah notes that throughout her life, she has relied on the Amish model of steady endurance and faith. During her 30-hour labor with her first child Caleb, she thinks of Amish martyrs burned at the stake, and when Caleb dies in her arms, she decides that her sorrow means her “faith had not been large enough” (14). This way of thinking places the onus on her, and she subsequently sees every challenge as a test of her faith, from Josiah’s infertility to the church and community’s shunning of her daughter Rachel. Hannah obeys this decree even as it wounds her, putting her faith in God and the church’s interpretation of God’s law above her instinct to protect her child. This structure steadies her until accumulated tragedy overwhelms it, causing her to doubt her faith and her God.

After Rachel and her grandson Jasper die, Hannah experiences a crisis of faith and looks for answers outside of the Amish community. She turns to her mother’s hidden book of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The book offers language for and validation of doubts that she also feels but cannot speak of inside her community. One line about life becoming heaven—“Except for its marauding Hand” (165)—matches her fear that God might also prey on those who trust Him. Marginal notes from her mother contribute to the spiritual connection she finds to this new text, showing her that other women in her family carried the same spiritual turmoil. This shifts Hannah’s perspective on her own doubt; she begins to see it less as a personal failure and more as a shared inheritance.

Hannah’s turmoil peaks when she receives her father’s confession that he sexually abused her sister Meg and her daughter Rachel. Hannah cannot forgive him, a choice that breaks from the Amish ideal of instant forgiveness; she compares her inability to forgive with the Amish community’s forgiveness after the West Nickel Mines shooting, but the horror of his actions makes the idea of forgiveness impossible to her. She leaves Josiah and moves in with Thomas, seeking safety and space from community expectations that have become impossible to meet. When she later returns to her home and marriage, she does not reclaim her earlier certainty. Instead, she arrives at a faith that rests alongside her emotions and her grief, a faith that she sees as stronger as a result of her doubt.