Silence
A Christian History
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A provocative meditation on the role of silence in Christian tradition by the New York Times bestselling author of Christianity
We live in a world dominated by noise. Religion is, for many, a haven from the clamor of everyday life, allowing us to pause for silent contemplation. But as Diarmaid MacCulloch shows, there are many forms of religious silence, from contemplation and prayer to repression and evasion. In his latest work, MacCulloch considers Jesus’s strategic use of silence in his confrontation with Pontius Pilate and traces the impact of the first mystics in Syria on monastic tradition. He discusses the complicated fate of silence in Protestant and evangelical tradition and confronts the more sinister institutional forms of silence. A groundbreaking book by one of our greatest historians, Silence challenges our fundamental views of spirituality and illuminates the deepest mysteries of faith.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Throughout the history of Christianity, silence has been as much a path toward human knowing of God as have vocal proclamations about God. Yet, as acclaimed church historian MacCulloch (A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years) points out in this stimulating and sweeping overview, the Christian church encourages silence as a useful theological method while also remaining silent in the face of evils that have devastated individuals and cultures. MacCulloch traces the religious emphasis on silence to pre-Christian times, discovering the impulse toward silence that Christianity adopted, then follows it through the New Testament and the early Church thinkers, and on through the iconoclastic reforms of the early eighth century and the much later Protestant reforms that often pitted word against silence. The author then turns to the grave and harmful silences in which the Church has been in varying ways complicit, such as clerical child abuse, the Holocaust, and slavery. MacCulloch persuasively shows how the Church has constructed and reconstructed silence in ways that many Christian thinkers would neither have expected nor embraced.
