Martin Laird, Ph.D., writer, professor of theology, Catholic priest, is the author of A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation (OUP, 2011), Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation (OUP, 2006) and Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge and Divine Presence (Oxford University Press, 2004). He also co-edited The Practice of the Presence of God: Theology as a Way of Life with Sheelah Treflé Hidden (Routledge, 2016).