Dazzling Darkness
Foreword 2nd edition When I read the first edition of Dazzling Darkness back in 2012 I recognised that this slim and unassuming book would come to have great importance for my own work and within a wider conversation about gender and vocation in the church. So it has proven, and I could not be more thrilled or privileged to have been asked to write a foreword to this revised and updated second edition. Rachel Mann is a deeply original thinker and immensely talented writer. Her incisive honesty and perceptive way of uncovering what has been hidden or unexamined have justly, since the first edition was published, meant that her writing (on this and other topics, running a diverse gamut from First World War remembrance practices to the spiritual themes of The Greatest Showman) has reached a wide and increasingly loyal audience. She is one of the few writers and speakers who can take me with her from genuine hilarity to the depths of despair and back again without feeling battered and bruised by the experience. Her enviable self-knowledge and self-critique prompt her readers to the same: to ask of themselves the same hard questions she asks herself. But her lightness of touch – often subtle, always wonderful – means that readers are made to feel safe to do that without retreating to defensiveness or anticipating how the journey will have to end. Rachel is always slightly diffident about being thought of as a theologian. Yet a theologian (and poet, and playwright, and actor,
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