Candles in the Dark: Faith, Hope and Love in a Time of Pandemic
ROWAN WILLIAMS
(SPCK, 112 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £7.99 • tel 020 7799 4064

Part thought-diary, part series of armchair sermons, Candles in the Dark collects Rowan Williams’ 26 weekly contributions to ‘Dearly Beloved’, a bulletin set up by St Clement’s Church in Cambridge at the onset of lockdown last March.
Covid-19 looms sometimes large, sometimes small over the six months of essays: 2020, it is easy to forget, was a dark year for many other reasons. The pandemic is the lens through which older evils have been brought to light and magnified.

This is why Williams urges us to aspire to more than a pre-Covid reset. We must harness the shock with which the pandemic has jolted society, he argues, not neutralise it; we must not undo our innovations. Consider the number of people, for instance, who for one reason or another could never normally take part in church life before online services. Lower pollution levels are an invitation to see the world – and therefore ourselves – more clearly. God alerted Job to the full abundance of life and his place within it, whereas we “think and often experience the world as no more than a backdrop to our desires and concerns”.