The rhetoric of darkness

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My mother died on the winter solstice shortly after her 50th birthday. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about darkness and the return of the light.

As I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, I wondered if I had fallen prey to the dualistic paradigm she finds so troubling: darkness, bad and God-less; light, good and God-filled. I don’t think so, but talking about darkness and light is tricky, in part because it can be so powerful.