Good Silence, Bad Silence

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'Talking about Silence' is a personal pilgrimage around an enjoyable paradox: that you can understand silence better if you talk about it. In his new series of essays, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores the many varieties of spiritual silence in human life and beyond, and what he's learned of its meanings in his six-decade career as a historian of religion. Framed by his memories of filming at some of the most significant Christian sites in the world for his land-mark TV series on the history of Christianity, Diarmaid explores how even though Christianity has been a religion of the word, it cannot escape silence, because silence is wrapped up in the lived experiences of Christians through time. He presents silence in all its different forms: as the truest expression of the divine, as well as a vehicle of the greatest evil, over the course of Christianity’s two thousand years of existence. In his final essay, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores how Christianity contains silences that need ending and the role the historian takes in doing so.