Review

Books

Culture

Podcasts

Re-enchanting

4 November 2025

5 min read

The book, the ritual, and the reader

Season 7 of Re-Enchanting explores how books shape our habits and our search for meaning

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

A reader sits on a sofa with a raised leg and holds a book

Jonathan Sanchez on Unsplash.

When was the last time a book elicited spontaneous reverence from you? It’s something of a cliché to say that books take you on a journey, but sometimes a book comes along which simply demands to be read with ceremony.

This is the experience of the writer Donna Freitas, just one of the guests welcomed onto season 7 of the Re-enchanting podcast. In her conversation with Belle Tindell and Justin Brierley, she describes how her morning routine of coffee and a book has practically attained the status of a ritual for her. Freitas describes the deliberate preparations she made for the final chapter of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, a historical novel exploring the relationship between two young soldiers in the trenches of the First World War as their idealised understanding of war shatters and their suppressed feelings for one another play out against a shifting backdrop of class, national identity and belonging. Freitas’ ceremonial approach to finishing her book - you’ll have to listen to the episode to hear more about this - may sound somewhat unusual at first for the respect and honour that it implies is due to a book, but this notion of textual reverence finds a distant echo in the Christian faith, where the Word, living and written, is central.

Freitas’ particular experience of faith is recounted in her book, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, but listening to her description of her reading experience posed its own questions for me. At what point does habit become ritual? And how do we distinguish between them? Even as people develop individual, secular rituals to give rhythm to their lives, this does not always translate into an openness towards religious ritual. Does this mean that ritual today is understood as an individual, rather than shared, activity? Despite some evidence suggesting a revival of sorts in the Christian faith, most of the growing churches in the UK tend place more emphasis on spontaneity than ritual, but perhaps our continued desire for ritual and familiarity should give mainstream churches a reason to pause in their current approaches to church planting?

Either way, for many of us, a home-grown ritual of an enticing cup of coffee paired with the smooth, dry pages of a book first thing in the morning may simply sound like an inviting, yet sadly unattainable, prospect. Sometimes just getting everyone and everything out the door on time constitutes an epic in itself. However, since there’s no harm in fantasizing, let’s peruse the Re-enchanting back-catalogue for more reading recommendations.

Looking back over season 7 of Re-enchanting, I’m struck by how popular biography remains amongst our guests’ reading choices. Nadim Ednan-Laperouse recommends Heidi Barr’s autobiographical account of the near-death experience which led to her conversion from Orthodox Judaism, What I Saw in Heaven. Lamorna Ash, whose work explores the softening of Gen Z’s attitude towards Christianity, appropriately lends balance to her Re-enchanting moment with her recommendation of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which recounts his journey away from faith. The faith landscape in the UK is certainly shifting at the present time and perhaps the only way to truly understand these shifts is to read both sides of the story. We need to read about journeys away from faith as much as journeys to faith in order to understand the society in which we work and witness. A data scientist might call these eliminating biases, a literary critic might call it awareness of an unreliable narrator.

Telling the story of someone’s life is at the centre of Bear Grylls’ most recent work, The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he retells the life of Jesus through the eyes of those around him. The emergence of the faith is told from the perspective of those coming to faith, a hint perhaps that faith has to be remade, reborn, resurrected even, afresh for each person. Read Bear Grylls’ own take on his book, written for Seen & Unseen earlier this year.

Grylls’ own work seems to have an almost essay-like quality through its short, accessible chapters and essay collections seem popular amongst our other guests as well. Lamorna Ash also recommends Pulphead by the journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan, a collection of essays spanning topics from eco-anxiety and the blues to the Tea Party and Christian rock, each giving a brief insight into the concerns and ponderings of a thousand other minds. It strikes me that such collections are the literary equivalents of hitting shuffle play, the perfect fit for those reading rituals that have to be scattered in-between other moments of activity. If you’re searching for some faith-based content for these moments, then I recommend Richard Carter’s Letters from Nazareth, a collection of meditations from the contemplative tradition written for those ‘catch your breath’ moments in the day.

Alternatively, if it’s escapism and adventure that you are after in these moments, then take up Grylls’ own suggestion, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann, a true story yet wildly adventurous. For those in search of more light-hearted reading, then turn to another stalwart of Re-enchanting reading lists, C.S. Lewis, whose The Silver Chair comes recommended by NYT columnist and author, Ross Douthat. As Lewis himself said, ‘a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’ Perhaps it’s time to put Lewis’ own works to the test.

Long summer days of the kind envisaged in children’s books may now be a distant memory for most of us, but with each change in season comes a new reason to pick up some reading material. I hope these autumnal days with their familiar ritual of falling leaves lead to a home-grown ritual of turning leaves for you.

Some further suggestions:

Letters from Nazareth by Richard Carter – Meditations on home from St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Her First American by Lore Segal – An exploration of Jewish-Black trauma and solidarity in 1950s New York.

seven steeples by Sara Baume – A meditative novel on the rhythmic course of life in rural Ireland.

How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee – Bite-sized explanations of our place in a changing climate.

Season 8 starts 12 November

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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