Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement

Rating:
Summary: A devastating critique of secular culture
Review: From the publisher's website:

"Why does our contemporary culture find it so hard to handle certain concepts and images? What aspects of the range of human possibilities have been lost in modernity and postmodernity?

"Rowan Williams argues that we have let go of a number of crucial imaginative patterns - 'icons' - for thinking about ourselves. He considers areas such as images of childhood, our awkwardness at speaking about community, our unwillingness to think seriously about remorse, and our devastating lack of vocabulary for the growth and nurture of the self through time.

"This timely book by a master of contemporary Christian thought sketches out a renewed language for the soul."

Rating:
Summary: A great book with tremendous insights into secular culture
Review: This book is well written and easly understandable, +Williams presents his arguments clearly and constructs a good framework from the begining. This is not a scholarly work, in the sense that it is written in a more relaxed style, but Williams does a great job in using points made previously in the book to illuminate his current arguments. Although this book is written with a focus upon happenings in Great Britain it is still very helpful for people in the US. I would reccomend reading this book along with some Stanley Hauerwas and other Post-liberal thinkers as there are many points of contact between Williams' critisicms and those made by post-liberals.

I highly recommend that everyone read this book; after all, how can I be wrong when I'm so sincere? :-p

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent and Timely
Review: This is the second book by Archbishop Rowan Williams that I have read and, regardless of what one may think of the Anglical Communion, someone such as Rowan Williams must give one some level of hope for its continued (and hopefully unified) existence. Although this work is less theological than a book such as _Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel_ (the other book by him that I have read), it is nonetheless still relevant as it finds its roots in a Christian worldview.

What I find both interesting and refreshing about the Archbishop is that he seems far more willing to listen to both sides of an issue than many other religious thinkers. I have heard him referred to as a "post-liberal"; although the usage of the word "post" is all too chic these days, it does seem to designate a type of continuity with a tradition while at the same time a certain level of discomfort with it. Particularly refreshing is his brief discussion about the use of the word "choice" in abortion debates and how the use of the word "choice" presupposes the action/s of an individual are divorced from a social context. Such an understanding of "choice" is, of course, naive; the result of such thinking can all too quickly become an ethics of power, which is contrary to so much of feminist ethics.

Williams seems to have a particular interest in language and its place in community, culture, and relationships - not in the purely romantic sense, but in the more general sense of relating one person to an other. He notes several times the place of language in expressing and sharing one's self with others and how certain dispositions - such as a lack of remorse - result in the inability to accurately and fully articulate one's existence in language to another person. His points are well thought out and touch something deep within not only the self, but within the soul as well (for a fuller discussion of the soul and the self, read the last chapter).

Disappointingly, the layout of this book is rather frustrating - there are several formatting errors that are completely unnecessary. While the Archbishop's writing makes this book well worth the read, it would have been nice if those that formatted the book had done a higher quality job - a job that matched the Archbishop's work.

All in all though, this book is another one by Rowan Williams that is well worth reading - and, perhaps as another reviewer has written, worth reading twice.