Seeing in the Dark: University Sermons

by Nicholas Lash

Nicholas Lash has been one of the most original and influential theologians in Europe and the US over the past forty years. "Seeing in the Dark" is the first collection of Lash's sermons to be published. Aimed at a different audience to his academic work, they reveal a more relaxed and informal side to his work. Consistently lively and thought-provoking, often humorous, they range widely from literature and politics to the philosophy of religion, from theology to meditations that take a surprising slant on familiar gospel readings.

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2005

About the author

Nicholas Langrishe Alleyne Lash was an English Roman Catholic theologian. The son of a brigadier in the British Indian Army, Nicholas Lash served in the Royal Engineers from 1951-1957. He then studied at Oscott College (of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham) and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He did not remain a priest for long, however, as he received permission to leave the priesthood and marry in 1976. At University of Cambridge, he became a Fellow of St Edmund's College (1969) and served as dean of the college (1971-1975). He also became a Fellow at Clare Hall (1988, and emeritus in 2001). He held the post of Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge from 1978 to 1999. Brilliant and imaginative, Nicholas Lash was the author of numerous theological books and a regular contributor to The Tablet. A loyal and obedient Roman Catholic, Lash voiced strong but measured criticism of authoritarian practices among leading figures in his tradition, arguing for open debate on a variety of topics, including the ordination of women. In 2017, a papal knighthood was conferred upon him by Pope Francis.

References:

*https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/news...

*https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/1317...

*https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/...

Reviews

[Chad D · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprise birthday present (the best kind, I suppose), this marvellous little sermon collection whose title is particularly apt. The sermons return to the tensions, the ambiguities and ambivalences, of seeing and being God's will and work in a world as of yet unredeemed, a world whose redemption we are becoming through the work of the Spirit. Finalised clarity is impossible, but the hints we get if we're looking, if our eyes are adjusting to the light possible in this darkness, the hints strewn throughout this lovely dry-witted prose, are hints of a truth so unimaginably beautiful that it's the only truth worth straining our eyes and spirit to see. Lash is particularly good at ending his sermons, each sermon an enacted promise that satisfaction awaits us if we persevere through the inevitable paradoxes and tensions of the sermon and of life itself.