Christian Wiman’s most recent collection of essays, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, has garnered much praise and acclaim since its release in April 2013. The New Republic called it “an apologia and a prayer, an invitation and a fellow traveler for any who suffer and all who believe.”
In addition to glowing reviews found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and The New Yorker, My Bright Abyss was recently named to the Wall Street Journal’s list of Best Books of 2013. They write, “Every generation needs someone to write about faith as lucidly as Christian Wiman does in this ‘meditation of a modern believer’.” Publishers Weekly listed it as one of the Best Religion Books of 2013, saying, “Readers are blessed with the fruit of Wiman’s pain, doubt, and poetic rumination. His exquisite essays have the intimate but choppy feel at times of journal entries, drawn from the deep and refined by a wordsmith, but nonetheless fragments shored against his ruin.”
On October 25, 2013, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly aired an interview with Professor Wiman, in which he discussed My Bright Abyss, his new appointment as senior lecturer of religion and literature at the ISM and YDS, and his affirmation that “poetry is not only a means of reaching out to God, but one of the ways through which God reaches out to us.”