These powerful reflections on biblical themes by one of today's most popular religious writers point up the truth that the darkness of doubt is often necessary to provoke a hunger for God. The Hungering Dark towers as one of Fredrick Buechner's best statements on contemporary belief challenged by doubt.

Drawing on texts from the Old and New Testaments, The Hungering Dark invites us to discover the hidden face of God, the manifestation of his grace, revealed in stillness, in unexpected places, often "through a glass, darkly." It invites us to say yes to "the possibility of God", and to recover "this fantastic hope that the future belongs to God...that holiness will return to our world."

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In the first essay in this beautiful collection of reflections on biblical themes, Frederick Buechner reminds us of a famous scene in the film La Dolce Vita: a helicopter is flying overhead, and suspended below it is a statue of Jesus. It flies over a swimming pool where a group of girls lounge; the men flying above circle back, trying to get the girls' phone numbers. All of this is immensely amusing to everyone in the audience, Buechner writes, until the camera zooms in on the statue itself, "until just for a moment the screen is filled with just the bearded face of Christ. For a moment, he continues, the theater was silent, "as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them." This, he concludes, "is much of what the Christian faith is."

We catch a glimpse of something true, Buechner tells us, and after that glimpse we are never again the same, try as we might to forget it. And the point of these essays, of course, is to remind us. --Doug Thorpe