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Loading... My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believerby Christian Wiman
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) julzreads | Jan 28, 2024 |   ) nmele | Jan 22, 2024 | ) Aldon.Hynes | Sep 14, 2021 | It is a book that will challenge your faith and grow it, nudging you toward Jesus and confusing your connection to divinity. I loved the process of reading it; however, there's little I can recall after finishing. It's a book that gives very few answers but is a helpful companion for the journey. Recommended. ( ) nrt43 | Dec 29, 2020 | My Bright Abyss Christian Wiman p 29 (  ) leebill | Apr 30, 2020 |
 Mr. Wiman works out his "meditation" in brief sections, many no longer than a page, among which he intersperses poems—his own and others'—as well as quotations from theologians and philosophers such as Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil. Mr. Wiman's book belongs on the same shelf as these authors' works, bringing their inquiries into the present  Wiman's new essay collection, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, is an exploration of his faith and life in extreme crisis. Noting how cancer's ever-presence has challenged his faith in Christianity, Western philosophy and lyric poetry, Wiman has chosen to plumb his ambivalence (his bright abyss) about all three rather than simply cementing his beliefs. What Wiman chooses to believe is that “we have souls and that they survive our deaths, in some sense that we are entirely incapable of imagining.” He knows how easy it is to dismiss such faith as wishful thinking. In fact, throughout the book he questions his every statement or speculation about ultimate things, especially those that comfort him in the extremity of pain and fear brought on by cancer. He anticipates the objections of skeptical readers, for he has had to wrestle with those objections himself: “Live long enough in secular culture, long enough to forget that it is secular culture, and at some point religious belief becomes preposterous to you. Atavistic. Laughable.” In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, to be released in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Christian Wiman—himself a fine poet and translator of the Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam—contemplates the meaning of poetic incarnation in specifically Christian terms, drawing on a wide range of authors. He blends poetry (his own and others'), criticism, theological speculation, and memoir in ways that defy easy categorization, although this work might well be considered a distant offspring of Pascal's Pensées (1669), which offered a skeptical audience at the beginning of the Enlightenment a defense of the Christian religion in the form of "thoughts" that resembled journal entries. Distinctions
Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith-responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition-might look like. Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but, to anyone whose experience of life and art, seems at times to over brim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives-and for our deaths, if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that, some of us call God? No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.54Literature American literature in English American essays in English 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.28)
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