Beginning with the Psalms and adding the distilled wisdom of years of study and writing, Martin Marty offers a meditation marked by insight, strength, and a sure, sober faith. Throughout A Cry of Absence, he pursues the metaphor of the ""winter of the heart."" Marty bases his concept of the wintry way to God on a passage from the theologian Karl Rahner, describing a ""wintry sort of spirituality."" It refers to movement toward faith that grapples with pain, uncertainty, evil, loss, and the mystery of death to discover ""hope on the winter-fallow landscape.""

""Generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S. . . . [Marty has written] poignant reflections occasioned by his first wife's death from cancer.""
-- Time

""Reach[es] down into the stark solitude that we experience in the form of grief, emptiness, abandonment, defeat, and despair. Marty analyzes how to deal with these emotions, emphasizing in particular how everyone must come to terms with the threat of absence.""
-- ALA Booklist

Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where for 35 years he taught religious history in three faculties. Since 1956 he has been on the masthead of the Christian Century and is editor of Context. He specializes in American religious history and headed the six-year ""Fundamentalism Project"" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds the National Medal of Humanities and the medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was honored with the National Book Award for Righteous Empire in 1971. An ordained Lutheran minister, he frequently also writes on theological themes.