What Are Soundings?

The search for depth in faith.

While idly passing an afternoon away in a second-hand bookstore, I was drawn to the slender red spine of a book called Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding. I’m not particularly drawn to the excesses of esoterica, but I felt compelled to slide the book off the shelf and glance at its pages. It turned out to be a collection of essays on Christian theology from the sixties, in which various authors grapple with “important questions which theologians are now being called upon to face, and which are not yet being faced with the necessary seriousness and determination”. Reader, I took the book home.

In his introduction to Soundings, A. R. Vidler expands on the metaphor of the title, saying that the modern world is in a period best suited “for making soundings, not charts or maps”. Soundings are an attempt to gauge the depths of an ocean, to simply understand the space to be explored, not to give directions to the bottom, the surface, or anywhere else. Leave the charts and ma…