Description: Celebrated thinker Rowan Williams explores the shared burdens and hopes that make solidarity possible.
Brief description: Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury and was until 2020 Master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including Looking East in Winter, Holy Living, and The Edge of Words, published by Bloomsbury Continuum. He lives in Cardiff and continues to broadcast, preach and lecture internationally. In 2022, he gave the second of the BBC's centenary Reith Lectures. He is contributing writer to The New Statesman.
Review Quotes:
"A humane and heartening book." --Guardian
"A magisterial vision of true comradeship." --Slavoj Zizek author of Quantum History "Here is classic Rowan Williams. This is a significant work of compassion and wisdom, one that - I dare to guess - will stand out even among the great range of writings that he has produced." --Church Times "A treasure trove of wisdom and insight. Its quiet optimism brings, in darkened days, a guiding light which gives the reader hope, despite the encircling gloom, that we might learn to live together with growing understanding, awareness, and a renewed sense of self." --A. N. Wilson author of Goethe: His Faustian Life "An engaging, convivial book...as important as it is challenging. An abstract book, and all the better for it. Solidarity...badly needed the intellectual rehabilitation it gets here." --The Tablet "[Rowan Williams] sees all angles...Other times he brings you to a point of clarity that makes you see the world differently... Wise and imaginative." --The i Paper "The book reflects with impressive erudition on a range of European philosophers." --The New Statesman "With his customary vision and unique form of attention, Rowan Williams... draws on the widest, carefully focussed, range of thinkers, each one illuminating the same dilemma - how to be together on a shared and bitterly contested planet? Rowan Williams has written a guide book and a plea. For anyone struggling with these issues, Solidarity should be indispensable." --Jacqueline Rose "In this pioneering book, Williams argues for solidarity as a genuinely new ideal and something that cannot be reduced to some combination of compassion and communalism. It is at once a window on the human condition and justice in action. This is vintage Williams." --James B. Murphy, Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, USA and author of How to Think Politically "Against cynics and opportunists, Rowan Williams compels us to reinvest in our shared existence in the name of a better world and a more just future." --Zahi Zalloua, Editor of The Comparatist and author of To Exist as a Problem, Being Black, Being Palestinian "In these torrid days of enmity, war and political delirium, Rowan Williams' meditation on how to work towards a world of solidarity, peace and truthfulness comes as a breath of fresh air. He shows us that solidarity is less a choice than a predicament and that it can be done badly or better, but never perfectly.His eloquent case for a life and thought of human and planetary solidarity calls us to renounce the comforts of innocence and cynicism and to risk submitting ourselves to a work of recognition that will leave us and our world strangely changed." --Howard Caygill, author of On Resistance