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The Worlds We Live In: Dialogues with Rowan Williams

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

This book is a record of a series of public dialogues between the Most Revd Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and various other experts in their fields, at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in September 2004. Issues addressed are:

¨    How should the world be governed?

¨    Is there an alternative to global capitalism?

¨    Environment and humanity - friends or foes?

¨    Is humanity killing itself?

The dialogues all explore the role of Christianity in responding to these challenges.

Each dialogue consists of a couple of presentations by invited speakers, followed by a response from the Archbishop, after which a discussion takes place in which the issues are further explored. Speakers and chairs include such famous names as Lord Owen, Baroness Shirley Williams, Professor John Kay and Sir Mark Tully, so the quality of presentation and discussion is extremely high (and profound) throughout. Helpfully, the Introduction provides a brief summary of all of the dialogues.

The editors have done an excellent and valuable job in making these discussions available to a wider audience. They would make excellent discussion starters for, say, a clergy gathering or a theological college course, or perhaps an undergraduate group, but I feel that outside such audiences, this book would have little interest or relevance. This is not so much because of the nature of the subjects, but more because the discussion format does not work very well in print. One feels that the arguments never quite get properly developed before a response kicks in. As a result, I found it a frustrating, and disjointed book to read.

Nevertheless, anyone wanting a fairly concise and authoritative exploration of the four issues addressed in these discussions would find this book extremely useful.