A Holy Dialogue
A Feature Review of
Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian
Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman
Hardcover: HarperOne, 2026
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Reviewed by Emily Cash
Glimmerings began as a substitute for shared walks: when circumstances prevented co-authors Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman from treading the streets of New Haven together, they turned to email instead. The meandering dialogue that transpired “struck something deep” in both of them, and they opted to share their exchange in this beautifully crafted book.
The subject of their exchange is, ostensibly, faith. But that is accurate only if faith is conceived in the largest sense, as a subject that underlies and subsumes many others. The exchange does begin with explicit attention to faith as such, but the authors traverse a wide and wild country of ideas over the course of the book, including big words and their instability and, more generally, the limits of language; the presence and absence of God; the meaning and mystery of attention; the poetry-prose relation in Job; the interrelationship of the Trinitarian persons (and the relationship between our endlessly varied perceptions of those persons); consciousness, human creatureliness, and the ontological divide between God and creation; reading the unwieldy Bible as a sacred text; how Christians relate to death; spiritual freedom, idolatry, prayer, suffering, and soul-body union.
Not only is the ideological and experiential terrain of content expansive, so are the voices drawn into their dialogue. They include Abraham Heschel, Rilke, Jurgen Moltmann, Martin Luther, Marilynne Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jon Fosse, Carlos Eire, and Wiman’s wife Danielle Chapman. They also engage with Simone Weil, Hegel, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Rowan Williams, James Joyce, Etty Hillesum, Paul Ricoeur, Giovanni Vattimo, Milton, Nietzsche, William James, Jack Miles, Robert Alter, Schopenhauer, Kant, and others.
As those admittedly tedious lists suggest, Glimmerings resists any kind of coherent summary and operates at high levels of thought. The authors pose questions like, “How can we recover existential resonance with Christ?” and “Do you feel our epistemic reality as a constriction?” Their exchange retains its full, formidable vitality: there are no explanations or redactions, presumably because the authors expect the reader to keep up. Keeping up is no small feat—especially because, like all epistolary communication, their exchange has no supportive structure. There are threads that get dropped, questions that are left unanswered or half-answered, unexpected shifts in topic, and passing references to the authors’ lives without much mediating context.
However, the wanderingly curious and responsive quality of the book also makes it human. It retains their disagreements, their misunderstandings and frustrations, their occasionally halting labor to make sense of the other and themselves, their lapses in communication and the impact of those silences, and the ways that they both hurt and help one another.
Even as the book’s content reflects the genius of its authors, its most notable feature is not so much what the two men explore but how. They both honestly assert their respective experiences and wisdom, but with loving submission to one another—submission not as surrender, but as an expression of permeability and care. And their exchange reveals not only mutual respect, but also mutual delight. In other words, they seem to revel in the ideas they’re sharing, the sharing itself, and in the particular person with whom they are sharing.
As I read Glimmerings, I thought of George Saunders’s reflections on the subjectivity of perception and the limited technology of language for conveying perception(s)—in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, he writes:
“I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone else also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly … the entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything. They try to communicate but aren’t any good at it. Hilarity ensues.”
Yes, hilarity often ensues … but so does holiness, and the reader of Glimmerings gets to bear witness to a kind of sanctity unfolding in the dialogue between Wiman and Volf. Even as they discuss their differing experiences and understandings of God’s absence, they are through their exchange mediating the presence of God to one another.
The book seems to me, above all, a provocation to dialogue. The form of the book involves the reader in the authors’ conversation. I will not be able to loan out my personal copy of the book because the margins are filled with my own responsive questions, concerns, and reactions (plus many doodled stars and hearts to mark significant or beautiful sections of the text). By activating the reader’s dialogical imagination, it is an invitation to move beyond the text into one’s own relationships with the same wholehearted honesty modeled by the authors. The book undermines the all-too-prevalent desire to inhabit homogeneous spaces – or, more accurately, it exposes homogeneity as falsehood. Because, while there are any number of similarities between the two authors—they live in the same place, work at the same institution, share certain religious commitments, and even look alike—their dialogue shows how different they are, and how those differences challenge and enrich them both.
Admittedly, there were moments when the dialogical form of Glimmerings was frustrating. It is clear that each author was operating outside of his natural mode for the sake of the other, and therefore their respective strengths were at times diminished, their respective offerings often left unconsummated. So, if what you want is a Christian Wiman book or Miroslav Volf book, this is not the book for you.
But through that diminishment, the reader glimpses the formative nature of their friendship and understands that their differing strengths are ultimately fed and fortified by their relationship. As Wiman confesses, he is “bolstered by the communion with a kindred soul.” And that sense, of being nourished by a dear and deep friendship, is a gift to the reader as well. So, while Glimmerings doesn’t overtly answer its core precipitating question – “What does it mean to love God?” – the book is a means of receiving the divine love that precedes and empowers our response, and it gestures at how powerfully the love of God is expressed in love of one another.
Emily Cash
Emily Cash serves as a pastor at Valley Springs Fellowship in Warsaw, Indiana. She cohosts the podcast Holy Writ, a conversation at the intersection of literature and scripture, and authors the Substack newsletter: Driftwood Prayers. Her scholarly work and ministry explore how biblical interpretation, spiritual formation, and practices of dialogical connection converge in the life of the church.
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