Christian Wiman, poet & essayist

Poet and essayist, Christian Wiman, is coming to Berkeley and will be at First Congregational Church on Friday night, and then at All Souls Parish Saturday morning. See flyers below for more information and click here for tickets to the Friday night event. See you there!

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Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of ten books, including his essays My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, and his poetry collection Every Riven Thing. From 2003 until 2013 he was the editor of Poetry magazine, the premier magazine for poetry in the English-speaking world.

Wiman is an intellectual mystic for our contemporary moment. Raised a Southern Baptist in West Texas, he rejected the religiosity of his childhood for many years as a secular poet, having adopted a “brand of bookish atheism” in college. An adult conversion experience emerged out of first, falling in love with his now wife (“it was human love that reawakened divine love”), and shortly thereafter, a diagnosis of a rare and incurable blood cancer.

Wiman is one of the leading voices calling for a new language of faith. “We need a poetics of belief,” Wiman writes of our age, “a language capacious enough to include a mystery that, ultimately, defeats it, and sufficiently intimate and inclusive to serve not only as individual expression but as communal need.”

Mr. Wiman has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and numerous other publications. His particular interests include modern poetry, the language of faith, “accidental” theology (that is, theology conducted by unexpected means), and what it means to be a Christian intellectual in a secular culture.