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The Books That Made Me
Books that made me: Rowan Williams FBA
Rowan Williams*†
,
rw488.magd@gmail.com
in conversation with Ritula Shah‡
Abstract
From the British Academy’s 2026 event series The Age of Self?, former Archbishop of Canterbury and theologian Lord Rowan Williams FBA discusses the books, writers and ideas that have shaped his intellectual and spiritual life, in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Ritula Shah. Their discussion ranges across childhood reading, theology, poetry, translation, spirituality, social justice and solidarity, reflecting on the relationship between literature, religion and contemporary society.
Keywords
Rowan Williamsliteraturetheologypoetrytranslationspiritualitysocial justicesolidarityreligionreadingcontemporary societyI’m delighted to introduce a theologian, poet and priest who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002 and remained in post until 2012. He was also, until 2020, the master of Magdalen College, Cambridge. Rowan Williams was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1990. He’s the author of many books, including Passions of the Soul and Looking East in Winter. His next book, Solidarity, is due to be published in three weeks [March 2026]. He was made a life peer in 2013 and is now Lord Williams of Oystermouth.
Welcome, Lord Williams. We’re going to be discussing the books that made you and shaped your thought and response to the world, which I think is going to be a brilliant conversation. There will, of course, be time for questions from all of you a little bit later on. Let’s begin at the beginning, because that’s always a good idea. I’m assuming that you have always been a prodigious reader and writer. Was that a habit that you developed when you were young?
Thank you, yes. I think it was, because I was very sickly as a child. I had meningitis when I was two and seemed to spend a lot of time in bed. That’s quite a good start for reading as there’s nothing much else to do.
Thinking about that time you spent sitting in bed and reading, was there a book that you encountered in your childhood that really left an impression on you?
I thought a lot about this, and the one I finally settled on was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which I think I must have read when I was about eight or nine. I haven’t re-read it for quite a long time, although I remember reading it to my children. Two things really struck me about it, and probably had some lasting impact. One was that the first chapter is all about people dying of cholera, which is a great start for a children’s book. The heroine’s mother, of course, dies of cholera in the first chapter. You have this extraordinarily vivid description of this child of about ten being left alone in a mouldering colonial mansion in India with just one or two Indian servants hanging around. She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know what’s happening.
She sees a snake slithering under the furniture and it dawns on her that everybody’s dead. Eventually, somebody turns up and rescues her and sends her off to recuperate in Britain. That’s quite a startling beginning. It haunted me. The first time I read it, I think I was really quite disturbed by it, but it’s quite important that we’re honest about certain features of our humanity. This first chapter, which named both mortality and, in a rather curious and indirect way, inequalities of power and privilege, stuck.
The second thing is that it’s unusual among children’s books in having two utterly obnoxious children as the heroes: Mary and Colin are spoiled, selfish, entitled brats. To say you have to find a way of somehow identifying with them is a bit of a cliché, but you have to get inside how these two selfish, entitled, miserable children are to be opened up to something a bit like ordinary humanity. How does it happen? It happens with the breakdown of one particular bit of social division in their befriending Dickon, the local Yorkshire lad, and because of the natural world. I use the word advisedly, but somehow ‘grace’ arrives in both of those contexts.
I have to confess, it was a book I adored as a child. It was that possibility of transformation and the healing nature of the natural world. Was that something that was important to you when you were growing up in Swansea?
Partly Swansea, partly Cardiff. Yes, we lived by the sea in Swansea for quite a few years. The changing face of the sea and the Gower coastal path both mattered enormously to me as a child and teenager. I think back to those distant days of being fifteen or sixteen and being able to disappear with friends from school for a day onto the Gower, or up onto Fairwood Common, just to discover and feel the natural order.
It is always interesting to think about books that may have been really foundational to one’s thinking. Obviously, as a child, you’re not reading books in that way, but they leave an impression on you. When you think about your career and life as a whole, is there a book that you have returned to at different stages of your life?
I guess one of the books I’ve most consistently re-read is maybe a slightly unusual choice. It’s Spiritual Letters by Abbot John Chapman. John Chapman was an English Benedictine monk who became Abbot of Downside in the 1920s or 1930s. He was a very distinguished scholar of the early church, who wrote some formidable stuff about the different recensions of the Latin Vulgate, and did some work on New Testament scholarship, but he was also a spiritual director of very unusual stature and depth. After he died in the 1930s, a lot of his letters were collected. They’re just full of the most remarkable human and divine wisdom. This is perhaps where there’s a connection to other things I’ve done, because he’s often writing to people who are trying to make a connection between the life of prayer and that of the mind.
Famously, the longest letter in the book, which is about 36 pages, is a letter to a young Jesuit who’s beginning his theological studies and hating it. He writes to Chapman to say, essentially, I’m bored out of my wits by theology and it doesn’t seem to connect remotely with anything that matters to me as a practising believer, let alone a member of a religious order. Chapman writes back this amazing letter in which he says, first of all, don’t panic. We all have these rough patches. Then, more interestingly, he says that actually, what we’re doing when we pray, and particularly when we try to pray in silence and attempt contemplation, makes sense against a broad picture of how God and the world interact, so let me just take a deep breath and show you something of the big picture. He goes on to talk about what it means to believe in creation, which effectively means to believe in a pervasive divine invitation and presence wherever you look. What it means to believe in the incarnation and the church. What it means to have a certain picture of how humanity works in which there isn’t a lethal opposition between the divine and the human, but an instinctive quivering of the needle in the direction of God.
At the end of the letter, he says, ‘This is the longest letter I have ever written, and I hope I never do it again.’ The point is that he’s trying to spell out exactly how the connection might work—how you might understand your theology, if you’ve got to do it, in terms of what you’re doing both in silent prayer and contemplation, and in active pastoral ministry. I suppose I read that when I was about 21 or 22. I remember thinking then, as I have every time I’ve opened it since, yes.
Did you consider becoming a monk?
I did, yes, for quite a few years. I like to think some of it was positive and that I liked the idea of having time to pray. I’m uncomfortably sure that quite a bit of it was negative and maybe wanting somebody else to do the cooking for me. As time went on other things happened.
In terms of this being a book that you return to over and over again, if you first read it in your twenties, do you feel your relationship to Chapman has changed over the years?
Yes. I suppose first time around, as with many books that you love, you read uncritically, don’t you? You think, yes, this immediately registers that this is how it is. Then you come back and you think, yes, fine, but. Then maybe you come back and you think that if I’m now able to question some of what’s in this book, it’s because the book has helped me question it. As I’ve been given resources to go a bit deeper by the book, even if I don’t now think it’s absolutely inspired scripture, I come back with new resources. Then you come full circle and think the old man was right about most things after all.
There is a maxim from the book that I think lots of people may be familiar with, which is, ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ Is that something you relate to?
I think that’s absolutely central to what Chapman’s talking about, and I do relate to it. I use it often when I’m trying to talk to people, individuals and groups, about prayer. I think what he’s pushing back against in the letters again and again is a particular mindset which thinks there’s a method that can be applied for everybody. If you’re not finding yourself at home with that, that’s your fault, so you better feel maximally guilty about it and go to confession a bit more often. Chapman is consistently saying to not even think about that. You, with your temperament and history, are the person who’s there. That’s the person God relates to because that’s the truth, and God doesn’t do falsehood, so stick with that.
Assume that you’re in a relationship with God which doesn’t depend on how you feel and think you’re doing. Hang on in what may be darkness, or may sometimes be light, and just assume that you are in the presence of healing and grace. As he says very powerfully in another of his famous lines, ‘Sometimes you’re held so close to the heart of God you can’t see God’s face.’ To me, that’s certainly a very resonant image which I’ve again used for myself and others over the years.
Chapman’s book has provided you with spiritual sustenance, if I can call it that. In your career as a theologian and public figure, is there a book that you would recommend to someone who is new to this world of spiritual thoughts and ideas?
I suppose two writers come to mind. I had the great delight of knowing the late Elizabeth Templeton, a wonderful Scottish theologian. Apart from some of the early work she did on philosophy of religion, she brought together a collection of pieces not long before her very untimely death called The Strangeness of God. I think I would recommend anybody beginning theology to look at this because it’s what it says on the tin, really. It’s a collection of quite quirky, unpredictable essays which look at theology from what I’d call neither a liberal or conservative point of view.
She’s a very idiosyncratic writer with a hugely imaginative style, who just helps you see that theology can be, in the best possible sense, a very weird discipline. Its interest and value have something to do with being weird. It gives you resources for seeing things oddly, and I think that’s a very educative thing. There is much talk about the role of the humanities in education, and I think the humanities are all about helping people see things weirdly, to be honest.
Just to digress from the book for a moment, what was it that drew you to studying theology? Were you a little bit weird?
I suppose I was, really. In my mid-teens, I very much fell in love with language, poetry and fiction. Perhaps rather untypically, I thought that was exactly what was going on when I went to church. Something was happening to the world of language which was rather exhilarating, unpredictable and, yes, weird. I wanted to find out more about that. I did think for quite a while that I ought to be studying English rather than theology. If you come to theology with that kind of aspiration and then spend your first six months learning Hebrew and Greek, you think, is this actually what I signed up for? It was, and that was wonderful in the long run, but at first, it was a bit odd. Then it all came together again. I thought, yes, of course, it is all about what I was learning, sensing and discovering in that literary world, and it made sense.
Thinking about Elizabeth Templeton, she was someone who really believed in dialogue and discussing theology in a very public way. She wanted it to be an open conversation. How do you think that point of view sits with the more muscular Christian nationalism that we’re seeing emerging, perhaps imported from the United States?
How does it sit? I think it sits down and then gets up again rather quickly. That is one of the problems, isn’t it? We have an environment in which it’s all too easy to weaponise religious discourse for one means or another. In other words, to make it rather less strange. If you weaponise something, you own it. You know how to manipulate it, put it in the field, wind it up and watch it go. Part of what Elizabeth was always interested in was the way in which all sorts of apparently obvious binaries and schematic pictures were not exactly exploded, but just radically pushed around by exposure to the fundamental realities. She wasn’t a relativist who thought all doctrinal language was up for grabs.
It was about dialogue. Wasn’t it?
It was about dialogue, but I think dialogue within a framework of some basic grammar about how you approach God which was meant to open things up rather than to close them down. Interesting that on the cover of the book, there’s that extraordinary sketch that William Blake made of the Trinity. Good pictures of the Trinity are rather rare for obvious reasons. It’s significant that Elizabeth wanted that on the cover. The doctrine of God as Trinity for a Christian is part of keeping it weird. It’s part of saying that the god we’re dealing with is not a god you can locate and walk around, as it were. You’ve somehow got to be in the middle of it.
Bearing in your mind your idea that there is something slightly weird about theology, but we also live in an age where people are looking, to use your word, to weaponise ideas, what advice would you have for someone who was thinking about studying theology now?
Basic advice is to keep your mind open to what questions theology is trying to answer and why. Why did this ever matter? How did it come to matter? Watch how people learn. Having taught the early history of the Christian church and doctrine for many years, I guess part of what I took from that was that I was watching people learn how to use language, and in that process, discover a bit more about why and how these conclusions matter. As I sometimes used to say to students, people didn’t engage in these theological controversies just because they hadn’t yet invented jigsaws and crosswords. They cared about these things, sometimes for very mixed reasons. Sometimes it gets tangled up, as it always has been, with different kinds of politics, whether it be the status of the imperial authority in Rome, the power of bishops, or other kinds of things like that. Having allowed for all that, you then say, yes, but there was something else going on which kept the conversation going.
It’s interesting that there are those who might say that in a very secular society, the ideas that come from theology have been sidelined. At the same time, you have this huge politicisation of religion in not just Christianity, but in many quarters. Is that something that’s hard to reconcile?
You might say it’s hard to reconcile morally. It’s also rather painfully predictable, given that the strangeness of God is quite hard work and it’s not what makes life easy for people. I think I’d also say, yes, we like to think of ourselves as a secular society, but going back to this question of how we learned to think as we do, all kinds of aspects of our culture have their roots in a particular kind of Christian discourse. Above all here, I think of what we sometimes lazily take for granted about human rights. In the book on solidarity, which you kindly mentioned, I’ve got a chapter there on the debates about who counts as human that come up with surprising and disturbing regularity. Are women, non-white people, or disabled people really human? At every stage of philosophical history, there have been apparently good reasons for saying that some categories of human beings count less than others.
Christian theology has frequently bought into versions of that and had then been yanked back to the central point by the ‘yes but’, as it were. If, as it says on the first page of scripture, human beings are made in the image of God, we’ve got a bit of a conceptual problem if we want to degrade various varieties of human. There’s a theological afterglow in some of our political and social thinking. You don’t have to be a Christian to recognise that, but I think it’s a dangerous illiteracy not to see that it’s a process by which we’ve come to this point of recognition. To know that something is not self-evident is to know how important it is to learn how to defend it. You don’t just go around saying, ‘But isn’t it obvious?’ and thinking that if you don’t believe this, you must be very wicked or stupid. You say, ‘What is it that stops people learning and ingesting this vision of humanity?’
Which brings us quite neatly onto another really important idea, and one which is very important to you. The question of social justice is something you’ve thought and written about a lot. What would you point to in terms of books that you’ve read that have informed your thinking?
We’re back to my teenage years in the 1960s again. It would probably have to be turning up a copy of Trevor Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort in the school library, that great testament to the beginnings of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Trevor Huddleston was an Anglican missionary and member of an Anglican religious community who spent a good few years in what’s now Soweto, and was then Sophiatown, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, campaigning relentlessly and aggressively, in the best sense, for justice for the people of the townships. I so well remember the cover picture, showing Trevor Huddleston in his religious habit in full and passionate flow, with hands upraised.
That book made me think that a lot of what I’d been rather unthinkingly taking for granted in the faith I was being raised in, in fact pressed you to some quite difficult decisions and side-taking. Trevor Huddleston’s book was about how being a rather old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic might press you to take a stand in certain circumstances against injustice. I think that became a very important thing for me, and Trevor Huddleston himself became a very important lodestone, for all that his life was complex and troubled in a good many aspects. The fact that I spent a couple of years living with Trevor’s monastic community at Mirfield and teaching in their college mattered a lot to me as I was beginning my work as a teacher.
As you read, absorbed and discussed the book, did you feel that the society and world that you found yourself in were open to those ideas? In a way, the ideas of the anti-apartheid movement took a long time to become part of the mainstream.
They did. One of the things about the 1960s was there was a bit of a sense that you were part of a tide that was flowing. I hate the language of being on the right side of history. There is no such thing as the right side of history. History doesn’t have sides. But there can be moments where you feel that currents of quite diverse perspectives on public and international issues are converging in subtle ways, or not so subtle ways, and things are possible that may not have been possible a few years before. I think the beginnings of the anti-apartheid movement in Britain were among the most prominent things of that era. For example, the campaign to take your account away from Barclays Bank and put it somewhere more ethically sound. That is something I was involved in as an undergraduate. Yes, I think I’d just say that in a number of ways, the hopefulness that certain apparently fixed and given elements in society might shift for the good was a big part of growing up in that era, and not one that’s available in quite the same way these days.
The other thing that I wanted to raise was that the 1960s was perhaps the era when television came of age. In 1966, there was a very famous television play about homelessness called Cathy Come Home. I think this is something that affected you too.
I was rather taken aback that my parents, who were quite conservative, couldn’t really see the point of it. They tended to think, as so many did and do, that homelessness is really down to failure of some kind. That kindled my sense of this as a really significant social issue, and when I first went up to Cambridge in 1968, I suppose it prompted me to get involved where and how I could with various bits of work with homeless people.
This is while you were an undergraduate.
While I was an undergraduate. I think it was my second night in Cambridge when I was walking back from something and I very vividly remember encountering a homeless man in the street. We got into conversation and I spent the next hour or so walking the streets with him and just hearing about some of what was going on. I think that was an important setting, in the sense that you adjust your settings, for my next three years, and I was never able to think of Cambridge just as King’s College Chapel.
Yes, it was an extraordinarily galvanising moment because I think the charity Crisis grew out of the reaction to that television play. It was a turning point in people perhaps understanding what was beneath their noses. Do you think fifty or sixty years later that we’ve actually become less sympathetic to the suffering of others?
Yes, we have. We tolerate levels of homelessness in this country which are scandalous.
Why?
I think we’ve not noticed, over the years, just what the social cost is of some of the disruptions, such as generations of unemployment, or trauma for returning servicemen and women. I remember that quite a lot of the homeless people I got to know back in the 1960s and 1970s were ex-service. They were on the streets because there was nothing for them when they came back from the forces, or had been in difficult and traumatic situations. So often, we’ve not factored in the cost of that. With a general loosening of social bonds and recognition, and empathy, we’ve just got used to something which we ought not to be used to. I really give thanks for the existence of The Big Issue. It’s not only a good magazine in itself which makes homelessness visible, it also makes visible the granular facts of how people cope with and react to it, and it weaves that in with general discussion of the kind of society we are.
Thinking more broadly and generally beyond homelessness and to having concern about wider society, there was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic when we all thought that we would look after our neighbours and try to help one another. It feels like an awfully long time ago. Why were we not able to somehow capture that spirit? I would argue it evaporated very quickly.
Very quickly. Perhaps it is simply that it’s hard work, but of course, it was extra hard work in that it wasn’t simply that a pandemic came and went. It was that during that period, other things were going on to further destabilise a world that was already dangerously frightened. It was frightened of the pandemic, and frightened to the point of paralysis about environmental crisis while being in denial about it. Barely were we out of the worst of it when the Ukraine war began. It’s not a good time for pondering solidarity and unselfishness, but it’s interesting that in that period, as in the financial crisis of 2008, one of the first things people register and talk about is that we have to have a reset. Remember that in 2008 people said the international banking system could not survive. Well, the international banking system seems remarkably resilient. Similarly, in the pandemic, we said that we now really knew the value of the work of basic carers and nurses. We now really knew that we over-rewarded some people for jobs that maybe did not deserve it. Mysteriously, it once again goes out of focus. Somebody ought to write a book about the typology of crises, the rhythm and pattern of them. I shan’t.
There’s an idea to take home. You’re someone who thinks profoundly. You are also a poet and have written a lot about the power of poetry. Is there a collection, or a poem, that you yourself turn to?
The collection would have to be W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems. I think I must have bought that when it first appeared in the mid- to late 1970s. I’d read a bit of Auden before and appreciated it, and knew I needed to read more. I suppose what it did for me as a poet was to wean me off a certain kind of laziness in writing. I’m generalising, but in my experience anyway, you start writing poetry as a young person, a teenager or a student, and an awful lot of it is absolute rubbish, very self-indulgent and very easy. Then somebody like Auden comes along and says that, if you’re going to do this seriously, you need to look at your tools better. Look at your words more closely. What are you doing with these words? You’re not just expressing your feelings. You’re making a pattern in words and sound that will communicate. I thought, right, yes, and put my hand up convicted of my own laziness as a writer.
I started writing a bit differently, trying to pay a bit more attention to word and sound, and admiring, as I still admire, Auden’s amazing technical facility. I don’t think he’s the greatest poet of the 20th century, but I think he’s the one I go back to in order to be reminded of craft in the very best sense. That had a big impact. I could also say that in the later 1970s and maybe the early 1980s, I began to read Geoffrey Hill, who had the same kind of impact for me. I think I can tell this story. I was really delighted when, many years later, I read a review of one of Geoffrey Hill’s new collections by a poet and critic that I had better leave nameless. At one point, they quoted a line of Hill and said, ‘This might be Les Murray, or worse still, Rowan Williams.’ I was delighted to be thought only a little bit worse than Geoffrey Hill.
I suppose the poem which I go back to most often, and in all sorts of contexts, would have to be George Herbert’s Love—‘Love bade me welcome’. I read it as a 17-year-old when we were doing the metaphysical poets for A-Level. I remember being very struck by the fact that the great and complicated Simone Weil was reciting that poem as she felt something taking hold of her on her retreat at the Benedictine Abbey at Solesmes. As I say, it’s one that I naturally want to quote and repeat in all kinds of contexts.
Is it these poets and poems that you think about when you’re writing? How does it all influence you as a poet yourself? You’ve talked about the craft, I suppose.
Another little anecdote is about R.S. Thomas, that great, craggy Welsh figure. He was doing a reading and afterwards was asked by somebody in the audience, ‘Could you tell us about your influences?’ R.S. gazed out of the window, looking uncompromising, as he always did. There was a long silence and eventually the chair said, ‘I don’t if you heard that, Mr Thomas, but there was somebody in the audience asking about your influences.’ There was another long pause and Thomas swung his head around said, ‘Surely not.’ Nobody really likes talking about their influences. You don’t imitate unless you know that’s exactly what you’re doing. Trying to write an Auden poem, or a Geoffrey Hill poem, in your own name is a recipe for disaster.
You have to find your own voice; but the odd and interesting thing about writing poetry is that sometimes it’s quite a good idea to try and write an Auden or Geoffrey Hill poem, or even a George Herbert poem, to flex the muscles and get something flowing, and to polish some of the skills in writing that you’re going to need. That’s part of the way in which writing poetry is always strangely ‘conversational’. You’re not just monologuing onto the page. In a very important sense, you are trying to catch the ball that a poem throws to you and find the direction in which you want to throw it back.
You’ve also translated poetry from Welsh. I find that translation from one language to another, capturing meanings, cadence and rhythm, really intriguing. What are the challenges involved?
The hardest thing in translating from Welsh is that classical Welsh poetry has a mercilessly complicated rhyme scheme. Putting that into English without sounding artificial is quite hard work, and I’m not sure it’s really possible. You have to start by trying to reimagine the entire poem in your head and find other vehicles to express why and how it’s interesting.
I confess to knowing nothing about classical Welsh poetry.
Don’t get me started; let’s just say it’s exceptionally intricate and demanding. The challenge I find in translating from other languages, not just Welsh, is in finding a balance between a faithful translation of the words of the poem, and a faithful translation of the poem. The poem is a whole pattern. It’s a whole story, not just a series of lines. You can produce a very neat rendering of what the lines say word by word, and you won’t have done the poem. You have to somehow learn how to inhabit the movement and logic of the poem, and follow that through. That means that, in a way, you’re writing a new poem in English. In another way, of course, you’re trying to be transparent to how the poem works in another language. That is complicated.
You’re a native Welsh speaker, so is there a sense in which you’re trying to bring the spirit of something intangible into the translated work?
You’re always doing that as a translator. The more you know a language, the more aware you are of what’s not getting through. That’s just the way it is, and that’s fine. Languages are, in various ways, quite rightly and properly, impenetrable to one another. That means you have to go on listening. If somebody said they were going to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy, or more recently, Czesław Miłosz’s poetry from Polish, and somebody else said, ‘Oh, but there is already a translation of the Divine Comedy’, or ‘There already is a complete translation of Miłosz’s poems in English’, that would be a bit crushing, wouldn’t it? That would suggest that, once you’ve got the equivalent, you didn’t have to worry anymore. It’s rather like saying, ‘Yes, by all means, put on another performance of King Lear, but it has been staged before.’ There is an inexhaustibility of language to language, of person to person. I suppose if I have any kind of metaphysics, it’s got a lot to do with that sense of the inexhaustibility in what we say and how we relate. We’re back to art and humanities again. It’s everything to do with that.
This is an opportunity to talk about your new book, Solidarity, which is an idea that really interests me. What drew you to this as an idea, and were there particular writers and thinkers that influenced you?
Part of the book is about some of those writers, including the really fascinating Polish priest and philosopher, Józef Tischner, who was chaplain to the Solidarność movement in Poland in the early 1980s, and who wrote some extraordinary stuff about the nature of solidarity. Two things particularly came out in his work. One is that he says the challenge is to find a ‘solidarity without enemies’, a sense of common purpose that doesn’t depend on being able to say, ‘This is what sets us in opposition to them.’ How do you do that? The second thing is the way in which he links solidarity with what he calls faithfulness and labour. Solidarity has a lot to do with shared work, a sense that you are contributing to something which neither you nor the other person is completely in control of. In working together, you discover new things in that process, and you discover a good, aim, project or product that neither of you could produce alone. For that to happen, you need to have fidelity, that is, you need to trust each other.
It’s the experience of work that consolidates trust, and it’s in that trustful working together that the deepest kinds of solidarity come up. Tischner is full of brilliant one-liners of that sort. He’s just bubbling over with ideas. I discovered him almost by chance in a footnote in somebody else’s book and thought that sounded interesting, so I started investigating a bit. That’s part of the book. It’s also looking at some other writers like Jan Patočka in what was Czechoslovakia, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a theologian, thinker, pastor and martyr in Nazi Germany. I guess a good deal of how the book works is that I realised as I began to write it that I was looking back on a cluster of bits of work I’d been doing that needed to be pulled together in this context.
I did some lectures in Harvard about twelve years ago on empathy as a notion in ethics and psychology, then did some more lectures abroad on human rights. I gradually came to see that the question about solidarity, and indeed the subtitle, ‘The Work of Recognition’, on how we recognise one another as agents we can respect and cooperate with, has a lot to do with empathy and how that works. The notion of human rights ultimately depends on some vaguely defined, but quite powerful, awareness that no one’s safe until everybody’s safe. Human rights has something to do with recognising that the good of the other is part of my good, as mine is part of theirs, rather than the siloed ethic which says the main thing is that my society should be first in the world, or that we look for world-beating achievement. I remember being really chilled in the pandemic when Boris Johnson was talking about ‘world-beating’ British medical science. Why world-beating? Who says it’s a competition?
In a way, that gets to the nub of it. Perhaps you disagree, but solidarity is a quite unfashionable notion in an age of hyper-individualism. People would argue that it perhaps involves abnegating a sense of self.
I think it involves a real transformation in the sense of self. The chapter on empathy has quite a bit to say about how the very notion of a self is, in a way, a social construction. By which I don’t mean that we take it from society or social norms, but that you can’t construct an idea even of your own body unless you imagine the perspective of another. In very basic terms, I cannot see the back of my head. You have to do that for me. To form a notion of a human body and a human agent, you need something other than where you’re sitting. The very idea of a self demands that. If we think we can construct a mythology of the self that absolves us from that, I think we have entered upon a profoundly untruthful and destructive picture of what and who we are.
Do you see this as being an idea that would be rejected by many on the right, although that’s not necessarily a particularly helpful term in the current context?
I shall wait and see with interest. Of course, the odd thing is that historically, the language of solidarity has been both a left and right phenomenon. If you go back to Burkean conservatism, then I think the largely benign emphasis there on learning together and natural affinity in a non-exclusive way has a lot to do with what I’m trying to explore. Equally, the language of solidarity in those terms is often associated with the left, and particularly with the Labour movement. ‘Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong’, as some of us may have sung in earlier years.
I’m going to move on from your book. I look forward to reading it. What does Rowan Williams read for pleasure? What do you do to relax when it comes to reading?
Quite a lot of golden age detective stories, if I’m honest, but there are novelists I go back to. I’m one of those people who re-reads enthusiastically. Among recent writers, I like to go back to read A.S. Byatt, who’s a great favourite in all kinds of ways.
Quite a daunting writer. Any recommendations for a beginner?
I can only say she’s so satisfying as a writer—by which I don’t mean consoling, because she certainly isn’t. The sheer felt depth of her characterisation, the density of detail of the prose, the construction of worlds of all kinds, including imaginative and literary, not only brilliant pastiche, as in Possession, but also deeply three-dimensional evocations of something like the world of a new university in A Whistling Woman. And I like to re-read the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies every few years.
Whose family, I think, was originally from Wales.
Yes. I met him once and we exchanged a few words in Welsh. Again, a complex figure. I don’t always like either the Jungian subtext, rather uncritically used, or the fogey-ish attitudes, but as an entertainer, pretty impressive. Thinking of books that have impacted me and another writer I go back to often, I like Thornton Wilder, who is not the most fashionable of American writers now.
Our Town is seen as a dated play, but one which is performed regularly.
I went to see it at the Grand Theatre in Swansea a few weeks ago with Michael Sheen in the main role. We did it at school in the sixth form. And there’s a novel by Wilder called The Ides of March, which he calls a ‘fantasia on events in the last days of the Roman republic’. It’s a novel about Caesar, Catullus, Cleopatra and various other figures. It’s mostly told in documents, letters, memos and public records. He messes around a great deal with the history of Julius Caesar’s lifetime, the chronology is all over the place, so it’s not a conventional historical novel, but I think what it does is give you insight into two or three very central things. One is something to do with the nature of power. The Caesar of this book is a deeply self-aware, complicated personality who is coping with the fact that he is in a position where everybody trusts him in a way which he knows is dangerous. He’s pushing back against that projection all the time, and yet is also seduced by it. Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome, which of course did happen in the year of Caesar’s assassination, slightly shifts the emotional balance and perspectives of the book in the most fascinating way. The evocation of Cleopatra as this amazingly seductive and chillingly intelligent young woman is beautifully done. There’s a passage somewhere where Caesar is describing to a friend how this is somebody who will sit on your lap and ask you questions about the gross national product of Cyprus.
Then there’s Catullus, whom we meet through his letters at various points. We also meet him at a dinner party where Caesar and he are both present. Catullus begins to relate a story about how you recognise a god. It’s a very enigmatic, difficult section, and I think what it’s talking about is that the sacred is never just embodied in the world in obvious visible form. It’s hidden. You need the work of recognition once again. The climax of that beautiful chapter is Caesar being passionately engaged with this, he can’t wait to find out where it’s all going. He gets up from the table to engage more fully with Catullus and collapses in an epileptic fit.
You never hear the end of the story, but for both Catullus and Caesar, it’s a transformational moment. Catullus, as artist, is part of Caesar’s answer to the question about power. I’m sort of riffing slightly on the book now, but power always seduces you into thinking that there can be a simple answer, politically, ethically or whatever, because you’re in charge so you can make things happen. What if power, and ultimately divine power, really isn’t like that? What if it’s always enigmatic and requiring you to look around and behind things, and not think of it as something you have got to incarnate?
Speaking as a theologian, of course, one of the things which is so extraordinary about our central story of the incarnation as Christians is that it’s a story about divine power that refuses to disclose itself as divine. So I think there are at least two central things in The Ides of March, Caesar reflecting on the nature of power, and the role of Catullus in representing the life-giving mystery that Caesar wants and needs to know through his art. Of course, it all builds up to the eve of Caesar’s assassination and we all know what happens, but it’s an amazing book. I love it.
You’ve sold it to me. One last fairly obvious question which is what are you reading now?
There are two books that I’ve been reading recently. One is David Bentley Hart’s new theological book, The Light of Tabor, about the theology of Christ, one chapter of which is largely devoted to showing why I’m wrong on the subject. It’s a very impressive book. I was also reading an ecclesiastical biography—but I feel I need to add a couple of other things. I recently (belatedly) finished Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, which was Booker shortlisted recently, and which I absolutely loved. I’ve also just finished reading Ruth Padel’s new poetry collection called Girl. Wonderful.
It is fascinating to have this conversation. Thank you so much, Lord Rowan Williams, for all that insight. I now have another mountain of books I want to read to add to the pile beside my bed already.
References
AudenW.H. (1976), Collected Poems (London, Faber & Faber).
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Cathy Come Home (1966), Screenplay: Jeremy Sandford, Director Ken Loach.
ChapmanJ. (1935), The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman O.S.B. Fourth Abbot of Downside (London, Sheen and Ward).
HartD.B. (2025), The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (Notre Dame IN, Notre Dame University Press). https://doi.org/10.1353/book.139066
HillG. (1986), Collected Poems (London, Deutsch).
Hodgson BurnettF. (1951 [1911]), The Secret Garden (Harmondsworth, Puffin).
HuddlestonT. (1956), Naught for your Comfort (London, Collins).
MillerA. (2025), The Land in Winter (London, Sceptre).
PadelR. (2024), Girl (London, Chatto & Windus).
TempletonE. (1993), The Strangeness of God: Essays in Contemporary Theology (London, Arthur James).
WilderT. (1938), Our Town.
WilderT. (1953), The Ides of March (London, Longman).
WilliamsR. (2021), Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London, Bloomsbury).
WilliamsR. (2024), Passions of the Soul (London, Bloomsbury) https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399415668
WilliamsR. (2026), Solidarity: The Work of Recognition (London, Bloomsbury).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a10
Published on: 12 June 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 2
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Williams, R. with Shah, R. (2026), ‘Books that made me: Rowan Williams FBA’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(2): a10 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a10Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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