Rowan Williams on solidarity

I don’t mean to compare myself in any serious way with a major thinker like Rowan Williams, but in his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, he is working on exactly the same problem that I have been working on in recent years: how to restore (or create!) a sense of a common humanity. But he is trying to do so in a very different way than I do, procedurally and conceptually. Rowan — as almost everyone seems to call him, and which, as will be seen, it is helpful to me to call him here; besides, he’s a friend — Rowan is a philosophical theologian, and this is largely a work of philosophical theology. I am a literary scholar and an essayist, and my approach arises from the preferences that accompany that role. Rowan has a long history of reading Wittgenstein and thinking in a Wittgensteinian way, and I don’t do that at all. For him, unpacking the philosophical implications of a particular vocabulary is important, and while I do that, I do it in a wholly different manner, often…