Diarmaid Mac Culloch acknowledged master of the big picture in Christian history unravels a polyphony of silences from the history of Christianity & beyond. He considers the surprisingly mixed attitudes of Judaism to silence Jewish & Christian borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine & the silences which were a feature of Jesus's brief ministry & witness. Besides prayer & mystical contemplation there are shame & evasion; careless & purposeful forgetting. Many deliberate silences are revealed: the forgetting of histories which were not useful to later Church authorities (such as the leadership roles of women among the first Christians) or the constant problems which Christianity has faced in dealing honestly with sexuality. Behind all this is the silence of God; & in a deeply personal final chapter Mac Culloch brings a message of optimism for those who still seek God beyond the clamorous noise of over-confident certainties.