Review

Books

Culture

Re-enchanting

26 December 2024

6 min read

Re-enchanting… reading lists

As a Re-enchanting series ends, here's our guests and staff book picks.

Tom Rippon

Tom studies English and French at the University of St Andrews, focusing on Older Scots.

Jodie Cook on Unsplash.

Inside a book, we find ‘a world that reflects our own, but isn’t this world’, at least that’s what David Bennett had to say when he appeared on our Re-enchanting podcast earlier this year, and given the power of books to transport us beyond the everyday, what better way to start each episode than with the question, ‘what are you reading?’

Many of our guests are self-confessed bookworms and admit to having several books on the go at once, dipping in and out according to their mood and the time of day, and a sizeable number profess a love of audiobooks. So, after a blitz of the Seen & Unseen back-catalogue – accompanied by many sidetracks into our guests’ ponderings with Belle Tindall and Justin Brierley – here’s what’s on the Re-enchanting reading list.

Chapter one: by way of introduction

At first glance, it would seem that our guests are a serious bunch, because the Re-enchanting book list is dominated by non-fiction. Works on the intersection of science, religion and society are clear front-runners, ranging from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Francis Spufford’s pick) to Charles Foster’s The Selfless Gene (Paul Kingsnorth), but more general works also abound. An interest in re-enchantment clearly involves careful study of the everyday from cradle – Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker) – to grave, for example, Stephen and Cynthia Covey’s father-daughter collaboration, Live Life in Crescendo, Your Most Important Work is Always Ahead of You (Michael Hastings). Some encouraging words at a time when questions about ageing and illness are on the national agenda.

Chapter two: heading (east) into deeper waters

As a podcast that invites its guests onto the roof of Lambeth Palace Library, it will come as no surprise that our guests’ picks also feature a selection of books on theology and spirituality. Nick Spencer recommends Prophecy and Discernment by Walter Moberly, whilst Brooklyn pastor Rasool Berry brings us back down to earth with Sam Alberry’s What God Has to Say About Our Bodies: Why the Gospel is Good News for Our Physical Selves.

Many guests, however, seem to be directing our attention eastwards towards the spirituality of Orthodox Christianity; their picks include classics such as Michael Kozlov and Arsenius Troyepolsky’s The Way of the Pilgrim (Martin Shaw); and The Art of Prayer by Hegumen Khariton (Molly Worthen); as well as a newer work by the twentieth-century saint, Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wounded by Love (Paul Kingsnorth). But this road of literary spirituality doesn’t stop in Eastern Europe, it keeps going until our arrival in Nepal via the memoirs and meditations of Tenzin Palmo in Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman’s Quest for Enlightenment (Sabina Alkira). Stories of global faith for a globalised world indeed.

Chapter three: story of my life

It is said that the best stories are the real ones and our guests apparently agree: biographies and memoirs pop up repeatedly throughout their picks. Sticking with the theme of spiritual journeys, our guests are reading works which recount journeys away from faith communities, such as Megan Phelps-Roper’s Unfollow (Glen Scrivener), as well as ones deeper into faith. One of the most striking of these is James Pennington’s nineteenth-century abolitionist pamphlet Two Years Absence (Esau McCaulley). Pennington was a self-taught pastor who left his church community following his re-enfranchisement to study theology at Princeton. His pamphlet was adapted from a sermon given to prepare his congregation for the journey which would take him deeper into his faith, but away from the community in which he lived it out. Many stories begin with a ‘setting out’ only to ‘return home’ in the closing pages, and perhaps this structure bears a closer resemblance to real life than it may initially appear?

Venturing away from the spiritual, but remaining in the political vein, perhaps the most frequently mentioned book so far has to be Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge, himself a Re-enchanting guest way back in series 2. Alternatively, readers who have had their fill of politics may wish to try the memoirs of polar explorer Robert Bartlett, as recommended by Molly Worthen, or, to take a leaf from Milton Jones, the equally fascinating and no-less-hair-raising Windswept and Interesting: My Autobiography by Billy Connolly.

So far, fiction has not featured much amongst our guests’ recommendations, but tentative favourite would be the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead. Set in present-day Appalachia and inspired by Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead touches on the poverty and struggles of America’s left-behind communities, who today find themselves worlds away from the glitz of global politics, yet wielding a political influence that extends far beyond their own borders.

Chapter four: A whole new world or the world reimagined?

In the instances when fiction has appeared in our guests’ bed stands, it seems that they have a taste for fantasy and science fiction. The favourite by far here is C. S. Lewis, with several guests reminiscing of their experience of reading Narnia, but for Jack Palmer-Wright the experience of rereading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe took special significance this year as he introduced it to his five-year-old for the first time. Adult readers looking to relive the experience of discovering Lewis for the first time should check out Lewis’ lesser-known Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairytale for Grown-Ups, recommended by Holly Ordway as a prophetic tale for today’s world.

Other stalwarts of the fantasy genre also made an appearance, such as J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, but perhaps the most surprising recommendation to come out of Re-enchanting would be Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (Frank Skinner). Published in 1666 and considered to be perhaps the first science-fiction novel, The Blazing World is set in a parallel world with fantastical technologies reached via the North Pole. The characters, including Cavendish herself, criss-cross between worlds as the novel moves through its three sections, ‘Romancical’, ‘Philosophical’ and ‘Fantastical’, exploring questions of social organisation, governance, and whether it is really possible to create a new religion complete with a fully fledged religious literature. Given the ongoing conversations about the place of religion in the twenty-first century, perhaps it’s time for Cavendish to make a comeback.

Chapter five: what next?

Stories are made of words but they are also made of silences, and these narrative gaps are just as key to getting a story to take flight as the most well-chosen, well-balanced phrase. The biggest gap in our Re-enchanting reading list is poetry. Books about poets – the Romantics, Seamus Heaney, to name a couple - have made an appearance, but we have yet to receive a straightforward poetry recommendation from any of our guests. So, should you feel the need to fill this gap, here’s a few from us for anyone looking for something to dip into over the coming year.

Sara Teasdale
Mary Oliver
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Jackie Kay
Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Victor Hugo

Happy reading and see you in 2025 for more Re-enchanting.

Explore Re-enchanting episodes

2024 staff picks

And here’s the picks from the rest of the Seen & Unseen editorial team.

Graham Tomlin, editor-in-chief

Sally Rooney: Normal People.
Jessie Childs: The Siege of Loyalty House: A New History of the English Civil War.

Belle Tindall, staff writer

Selina Stone: Tarry Awhile .
Sally Rooney: Intermezzo.
Frank C. Laubach: Letters from a Modern Mystic.

Nick Jones, senior editor

Jon Fosse: A Shining.
Mary Millar: Jane Haining – A Life of Love and Courage.
Peter Ross: Steeple Chasing.

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Review

Books

Culture

Economics

Politics

8 April 2025

5 min read

Abundance and the attempt to build a better world

Is this policy the antidote to the zero-sum game of politics?

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Construction worker climb a steel framework.

Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash.

What do you do when more money won’t solve a government’s problems? Abundance: How We Build A Better Future, the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is an extended polemic against a form of government—particularly as practiced by US liberals—that stymies policy delivery. However technocratic that sounds (and the book often is), it forces readers to confront deeper questions about the nature of politics.

At the heart of the book is a critique of what the authors, drawing on the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, call 'Everything Bagel Liberalism'. In the film topping are added to bagel to the point that it becomes a blackhole. So too, Klein and Thompson suggest, with so much well-intended policy, in which in seeking to tick every possible box and satisfy a range of regulators it becomes a delivery blackhole and little is actually done. The authors ask whether parties of the left are focused on measuring spending to the exclusion of measuring what gets built.

The first chapter gives a good sense of their approach.  It tells a familiar story about the way in which so many are being priced out of cities because of a lack of affordable housing. However, in doing so, it highlights a surprising harm: that geographical proximity remains an important enabler of technological innovation so a lack of affordable housing in cities means a loss of creativity.

The diagnosis is perhaps even more surprising coming from American liberals. Special interests—including those seeking to protect the value of their own houses—weaponize interlocking sets of well-intentioned legislation to prevent homes being built. Subsequent chapters apply that similar logic—regulation and a lack of focus resulting in inaction—to infrastructure, government capacity, scientific research and the implementation of new inventions.

The book's strength is that it is not particularly detailed in its policy proposals. Klein and Thompson instead offer abundance as a lens through which policy development can be viewed: what do we need more of and how do we get it? This lens can be applied from within a wide range of ideological frameworks. It is not itself a worldview but a challenge that any politics should be obsessed with effective delivery not simply desiring the correct end-state.

The book is unapologetically focused on America and the failures of progressive governance, particularly in California. (One of this book's peculiar legacies will be to leave many who have never been there perpetually invested in California's struggles to build high-speed rail.) Nevertheless, the approach already has its advocates in the UK - for example, the Centre for British Progress which set out its stall last week, and it is not hard to see how an agenda here that could be seized by a less hesitant Starmer government.

Any plausible political analysis must hold together the reality of scarcity and abundance. Losing sight of either unmoors us from the actual world we find ourselves in.

Indeed, perhaps the book might feel more realistic if it had other countries in mind. Reviewing Abundance, Columbia economist Adam Tooze describes the book as painful to read, characterising it as a manifesto for the Harris presidency that never was. Indeed, according to the authors, the book was originally scheduled for release in summer 2024 to influence the Democratic platform leading up to the 2024 elections. Instead, it appears in 2025 amid Trump's assault on institutions, Tooze's Columbia among them.

In an interview on Pod Save America, the authors argued that the book is still relevant, offering a framework with which Democrats can oppose Trump. Thompson described the Trumpian view of politics as fundamentally shaped by scarcity. He suggests that behind 47th president's policies—most notably the tariff agenda—is the conviction that every interaction is zero-sum; for you to gain, I must lose.  On this analysis, the way to oppose a politics that pits groups against one another over limited resources—housing, trade, jobs—is to figure out how the government can provide more and argue for it. In its critique and its hopefulness, Abundance offers those who believe in institutions a way to navigate—even work with the grain of—the anti-institutional temperament of contemporary politics.

There might be something to this messaging, but scarcity plays an unmissable role in Klein and Thompson's argument. Remember that they characterise what they oppose as "Everything Bagel Liberalism", policy that tries to achieve every outcome and loses focus in doing so. They may conceive scarcity differently to Trump, but their book is a warning policy cannot deliver as much as we think. It is a call for us to oppose, to compete against those special interests—whether they be residents’ associations wanting to hold up house prices or politicians wanting to cut research grants—whose policy priorities overload the bagel.

At heart, the book is a reminder that ultimately the salient scarcity in politics is not housing or trade or even money. It is time. Abundance cautions governments that unfocussed policy yields the time entrusted to them by the governed.

Humans cannot lead politics completely beyond its zero-sum logic. The world is so often a violent competition over resources and government must restrain that violence while avoiding being co-opted as a means of exploitation. And yet, politics is also—even primarily—an avenue through which communities answer a primal summons to be fruitful, abundant.

Ultimately, any plausible political analysis must hold together the reality of scarcity and abundance. Losing sight of either unmoors us from the actual world we find ourselves in. Yes, there is so much broken and warped to reckon with, and we must grapple too with our finitude’s bluntness, but so too is creation replete with goodness, among them our capacity to invent and deliver what we need together.

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