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  • Published: 28 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241952320
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99

Silence

A Christian History




Silence shows the history of Christianity in a fresh and fascinating new light.

This book unravels a polyphony of silences from the history of Christianity and beyond. MacCulloch considers Judaeo-Christian borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine, and the silences which were a feature of Jesus's brief ministry. Besides prayer and contemplation, there are shame and evasion; careless and purposeful forgetting.
Many deliberate silences are revealed: the forgetting of histories inconvenient to later Church authorities, and Christianity's problems in dealing honestly with sexuality. Behind all this is the silence of God. In a deeply personal conclusion, MacCulloch brings a message of optimism for those still seeking God beyond the clamour of over-confident certainties.

  • Published: 28 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241952320
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Award, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation: Europe's House Divided (2003) won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Book Prize. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years and the BBC television series based on it appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, the world's largest history prize, in 2010. His television series How God Made the English aired on BBC2 in March 2012. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and was knighted in the New Year's Honours List of 2012.

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