Scan barcode
A review by billyjepma
He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art by Christian Wiman
5.0
Christian Wiman is one of my favorite writers. His prose––and poetry, albeit to a different degree––is both dense and smooth. He writes sentences that start, stop, redirect themselves for words, lines, or even pages at a time, and then somehow end up back where they started, but bring with them a newfound understanding that changes the way Wiman, and his reader, interprets his original thought.
For a book that's barely over a 100 pages, "He Held Radical Light" is a slow and careful read. Wiman packs his prose with so much thought and narrative that to do anything less than a committed, deliberate reading would feel like a disservice to the depth and breadth of Wiman's meanderingly-precise examinations of faith, poetry, art, death, and more.
Maybe that means this book is pretentious––it may very well be––but reading it over the last three weeks has been the closest thing to a "devotional" I've done in years. If you know Wiman's writing at all, then "He Held Radical Light" won't reinvent the wheel; but it will sharpen it. This book could almost act as the thesis statement for all of Wiman's work; it covers all the themes and subjects he values––that I, in turn, value––and his interjecting narratives of his personal life and experiences help create a book that seems to encompass everything Wiman has written about while also asserting that his journey towards understanding, faith, and art is far from over.
If that doesn't make any sense, don't worry, I'm not sure if it makes any sense to me either. What does make sense to me is how much this book touched me, or better yet, *pricked* me, like a pin that draws a bead of blood. It's an honest, raw, and deeply thoughtful analysis of art, its ties to something More, and its effect on those who consume it. I can't recommend it enough.
For a book that's barely over a 100 pages, "He Held Radical Light" is a slow and careful read. Wiman packs his prose with so much thought and narrative that to do anything less than a committed, deliberate reading would feel like a disservice to the depth and breadth of Wiman's meanderingly-precise examinations of faith, poetry, art, death, and more.
Maybe that means this book is pretentious––it may very well be––but reading it over the last three weeks has been the closest thing to a "devotional" I've done in years. If you know Wiman's writing at all, then "He Held Radical Light" won't reinvent the wheel; but it will sharpen it. This book could almost act as the thesis statement for all of Wiman's work; it covers all the themes and subjects he values––that I, in turn, value––and his interjecting narratives of his personal life and experiences help create a book that seems to encompass everything Wiman has written about while also asserting that his journey towards understanding, faith, and art is far from over.
If that doesn't make any sense, don't worry, I'm not sure if it makes any sense to me either. What does make sense to me is how much this book touched me, or better yet, *pricked* me, like a pin that draws a bead of blood. It's an honest, raw, and deeply thoughtful analysis of art, its ties to something More, and its effect on those who consume it. I can't recommend it enough.