Williams, Rowan – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:02:22 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Williams, Rowan – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 Passions of the soul https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/passions-of-the-soul/ Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/passions-of-the-soul/ The Eastern Christian tradition is filled with theological and spiritual riches.

In Passions of the Soul, Rowan Williams opens up the great classics of Eastern Christian writing to show how it can help us to understand and cope with the ups and downs of modern life.

With compelling and illuminating insight, he shows the cost of living in a culture that is theologically and philosophically undernourished, working with a diminished and trivialized picture of the human self. The Eastern tradition teaches us how to develop our self-knowledge and awareness, so that we can relate to the world without selfish illusions. Only then can we be ready for our eyes to be opened to God, and avoid destructive patterns of behaviour.

Only in this way can we understand the kind of people we need to become.

]]> Looking East in Winter https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/looking-east-in-winter/ Thu, 24 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=14113 In many ways, we seem to be living in wintry times at present in the Western world. In this new book, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and a noted scholar of Eastern Christianity, introduces us to some aspects and personalities of the Orthodox Christian world, from the desert contemplatives of the fourth century to philosophers, novelists and activists of the modern era, that suggest where we might look for fresh light and warmth. He shows how this rich and diverse world opens up new ways of thinking about spirit and body, prayer and action, worship and social transformation, which go beyond the polarisations we take for granted.Taking in the world of the great spiritual anthology, the Philokalia, and the explorations of Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discussing the witness of figures like Maria Skobtsova, murdered in a German concentration camp for her defence of Jewish refugees, and the challenging theologies of modern Greek thinkers like John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras, Rowan Williams opens the door to a ‘climate and landscape of our humanity that can indeed be warmed and transfigured’.This is an original and illuminating vision of a Christian world still none too familiar to Western believers and even to students of theology, showing how the deep-rooted themes of Eastern Christian thought can prompt new perspectives on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.

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