Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing
By James K. A. Smith
Yale University Press, 256 pages
Published March 24, 2026
Wilderness wandering. A walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The dark night of the soul. Different metaphors from the Christian tradition all seek to answer the question that provides the muse for this book: “What happens when the lights go out, and the world goes dark?”
What follows is a traverse through the heart and mind of James K. A. Smith, the Calvin University philosopher best known for books like You Are What You Love. Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is a welcome departure — not because I disliked his prior work, but because intellectual honesty and emotional empathy fill the pages of this book. Here is a first-class philosopher who found himself in a dark time that he could not understand.
In a time when each day opens with the icy chill of the news cycle and when churches and communities are divided by politics, many of us experience a darkness that saps the human spirit. We live in a collective dark night of the soul, and we all seek to find our way out; there may not be a timelier book release.
Make Your Home prods us to embrace the darkness as a pathway to a new existence on the other side, however long it may take.
In this darkness, Smith explains, we feel an impulse for knowledge, as knowledge offers a sense of mastery and control. If we only had the truth, we convince ourselves, the darkness would dissipate and life in the light would return. “But,” Smith asks, “what if we need something other than knowledge?” For we do not face just misinformation; we also face fear and the lack of control that exacerbates it. Yet only perfect love will cast out fear. Make Your Home prods us to embrace the darkness as a pathway to a new existence on the other side, however long it may take.
Smith takes us on his own journey through the night, inviting us to embrace the mystical tradition, a posture and way of life shaped over millennia that provides “a way to be when you don’t know.” Along Smith’s trail, the reader converses with philosophers such as Hegel, visits art museums to ponder Paolini, sits as an understudy to mystics like St. John of the Cross and takes in cinema such as “Paris, Texas.” Not every reader will be drawn in by these discourses, nor will every reader feel they can relate. Regardless, through mysticism, art, film and poetry, Smith finds footing in the darkness and, more importantly, experiences the love and embrace of communion.
Two types of readers will find this book beneficial. First, those who have walked through their own darkness will appreciate the way of self-reflection. Second, those currently experiencing their own dark night will find this book to be a kind of salve — not because Smith knows the way out, but because he makes readers feel they are not alone. In this book, I found exactly what my soul desired: a fellow companion wandering through the dark. In the darkness, we discover that we need not have all the answers to keep living. Instead, we meet a love that conquers fear, instills trust and grants rest.
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