Name: Dana Kraft's review of My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
Item: My Bright Abyss
Rating: 3
Author: Dana Kraft

Christian Wiman

A poet and a man of strong Christian faith meditates on life, death and being an artist after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and describes how he dealt with the creeping doubts and the increasing pain. 40,000 first printing.

Meditation of a Modern Believer

My Bright Abyss

Dana Kraft

Karis Ryu

how did this disappear from my bookshelf??! anyway, still bawling.

The concepts that really struck a chord for me in the book were:
- the importance of language in our somewhat futile attempt to understand God
- the notion that Christ is present with us and is in the little details of life. He's about the specific not the general. I like the words he uses but I'm not sure I totally understand them.
- I appreciate his purposeful struggle with his faith. So many people try to persuade us by demonstrating their certainty. I gave the author more leeway because he was clearly searching for a better understanding of God, and what then.
- the book makes me wonder what i'm Waiting or searching for, and what I expect to do if and when I find it.

At times, more often than not, his literary references and quotes from poetry were lost on me. I was able to pull some meaning from a few of them, but not many.

Gabe Cortez

Kevan Lee

Beau

Christopher McCaffery

Adam Jahnke

Eight 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 overbrim 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? One of Publishers Weekly's Best Religion Books of 2013

Dana Kraft &
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman

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Dana Kraft &My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman

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Dana Kraft &
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman