Monday 8th November, 2021
Graham Turner, The Power of Silence: The Riches That Lie Within (Bloomsbury, 2012), 58.
Image: Annie Spratt, New Forest, UK, @anniespratt
This quote is from Graham Turner's The Power of Silence: The Riches That Lie Within (Bloomsbury, 2012), 58: see here. This is perhaps a surprising book to emerge from the BBC's first Economics Correspondent (appointed 1965)! In it, Turner seeks to draw his secular readership into reflecting on and finding new belief in the power of silence. Although the book by this former journalist is predominantly secular in nature, it is written by a man of faith. Based in interviews with composers, actors, psychotherapists, mountaineers, prisoners and peace workers, as well as the more expected monastics and religious leaders, Turner investigates practices of silence from the deep stillness found in the high Alps to the silences held in performances by actors and classical musicians, as well as the meditative engagement with silence of contemplatives in the Egyptian desert. For a review of the book, see here. You can find The Church Times' 'Back Page Interview' with Graham Turner, from 2017, here.