The Silence That Answers Back: Poems

In The Silence That Answers Back, Andrew Ray Williams writes from the ordinary places where life opens into grief, wonder, and mystery: a hospital room, a checkout line, a child's bedroom, a cemetery path, a walk after an argument. Here grief is not separate from love, nor faith from doubt. These poems look steadily at anxiety, illness, marriage, fatherhood, and the ache of memory, while listening for what the natural world may still be saying--a cardinal at the window, bluebells in a clearing, water over stone, trees rising without seeing the horizon.



Tender, plainspoken, and prayerful, this collection does not hurry toward consolation. It stays with what wounds and what sustains, listening until even silence becomes an answer.

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and Docent of Ecumenics at University of Helsinki, Finland. A native of Finland, he has taught and lived with his family in Thailand and participates widely in international ecumenical, theological, and interreligious projects. Among about thirty books and monographs authored and edited, his main work is the five-volume A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World.



Andrew Ray Williams is Pastor of Family Worship Center (York, Pennsylvania), an adjunct professor at Life Pacific University, and a St. Basil Fellow at the Center for Pastor Theologians. He is the author of Washed in the Spirit: Toward a Pentecostal Theology of Water Baptism and Boundless Love: A Companion to Clark H. Pinnock's Theology.



Patrick Oden is Director of Academic Integration, Fuller Equip, and an affiliate professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of such books as Hope for the Oppressor: Discovering Freedom through Transformative Community and The Transformative Church: New Ecclesial Models and the Theology of Jurgen Moltmann.