In this little book, Pramuk provides nine “retreat conferences” that invite the reader to taste and experience the presence of the Wisdom of God, whom he describes as Sophia, the Feminine Divine. I say “taste and experience” because unlike Pramuk's earlier work, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, this book seeks to present the main ideas of his earlier analysis on the “sophianic” wisdom found in Merton's writings in a more “narrative, poetic, and personal key” (x), so as to awaken a similar experience within the reader. The result is evocative spiritual writing on Sophia—the Wisdom of God—and particularly how that wisdom is both hidden and revealed within the context of the present world's joys and sufferings. Thus, the reader is invited to join with the author in realizing “a renewed sense of God's nearness and friendship, and above all a fierce hope, rising not from any formal ‘theology’ as such but divined from the hidden matrices of life itself, Life made from Love” (xi).

Pramuk's style in this work is very much like Merton's own; the writing is intuitive, spontaneous, and personal rather than formal and analytical. Rather than developing a critical analysis of Merton's context, thought, and writings regarding Sophia and feminine characteristics of the divine, this text develops a creative spiritual reflection on Sophia as “the presence and mercy of God ‘pervading all things' to which Merton's witness points” (x). This is not to say that the work lacks critical theological reflection, but that, by the author's own admission, “formal theology” is neither the focus nor tone of the work. Following this aim, Pramuk brings the reader through beautifully written and often personal reflections on Sophia first, briefly, through Merton's own life context, then though his writings (particularly his prose poem Hagia Sophia) with reference to the wisdom tradition found among Russian Orthodox theologians, and finally through the journals of Etty Hillesum, which describe her life as a Jew living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Like one of Merton's journals, At Play in Creation often pulls together multiple images and literary and theological sources within the same paragraph. Sophia is variously identified as “the eros of God,” “the co-creativity of God,” “the feminine Wisdom Child,” “the female face of God,” “God's nurturing, indwelling presence,” “the divine Child in us,” “the power of God's mercy,” “God's freedom for love,” and “God herself.” Also, Pramuk assembles a vast cloud of witnesses to Sophia's presence, including, among many others, Boris Pasternak, Lao Tzu, Martin Buber, Henry David Thoreau, Sergius Bulgakov, Abraham Heschel, Malala Yousafzai, Rowan Williams, Leonard Cohen, Bill Withers, Joni Mitchell, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Pramuk's own son, Henry.

Of particular interest is the author's inclusion of a chapter on Hillesum. Through Hillesum's journals, Pramuk provides at once a connection with Jewish traditions of wisdom and an account of Sophia as hope amid darkness and of God's power present in “the vulnerability and weakness of incarnate love” (79). Displaying very fine spiritual writing reminiscent of Merton's own prose, Pramuk writes that to live with wisdom is to “live fully awake in the center of these contradictions of our times while refusing to be defined by them, to accommodate ourselves to them, like an essence fed into a computer” (85).

After finishing the book, the reader may still be left wondering what, exactly, makes Sophia the embodiment of “the Feminine Divine.” Pramuk remarks that Merton hears Sophia as the voice of God “in an unmistakably feminine key” (32), but there is little sustained exploration of feminist theory in fleshing out what specifically makes Sophia a feminine reality. The title of the book might lead a reader to desire more in this respect. Nevertheless, those interested in a more critical analysis of Sophia in Merton's writing will no doubt find such in Pramuk's earlier work. The present work offers readers familiar with Merton and biblical and theological wisdom traditions a personally enriching and intellectually creative exploration of Sophia, the Wisdom of God.