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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Article

Culture

Generosity

Psychology

Virtues

28 April 2025

5 min read

AI will never codify the unruly instructions that make us human

The many exceptions to the rules are what make us human.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A desperate man wearing 18th century clothes holds candlesticks

Jean Valjean and the candlesticks, in Les Misérables.

On average, students with surnames beginning in the letters A-E get higher grades than those who come later in the alphabet. Good looking people get more favourable divorce settlements through the courts, and higher payouts for damages. Tall people are more likely to get promoted than their shorter colleagues, and judges give out harsher sentences just before lunch. It is clear that human judgement is problematically biased – sometimes with significant consequences.

But imagine you were on the receiving end of such treatment, and wanted to appeal your overly harsh sentence, your unfair court settlement or your punitive essay grade: is Artificial Intelligence the answer? Is AI intelligent enough to review the evidence, consider the rules, ignore human vagaries, and issue an impartial, more sophisticated outcome?

In many cases, the short answer is yes. Conveniently, AI can review 50 CVs, conduct 50 “chatbot” style interviews, and identify which candidates best fit the criteria for promotion. But is the short and convenient answer always what we want? In their recent publication, As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson discuss research which shows that, if wrongly condemned to be shot by a military court but given one last appeal, most people would prefer to appeal in person to a human judge than have the facts of their case reviewed by an AI computer. Likewise, terminally ill patients indicate a preference for doctor’s opinions over computer calculations on when to withdraw life sustaining treatment, even though a computer has a higher predictive power to judge when someone’s life might be coming to an end. This preference may seem counterintuitive, but apparently the cold impartiality—and at times, the impenetrability—of machine logic might work for promotions, but fails to satisfy the desire for human dignity when it comes to matters of life and death.

In addition, Shadbolt and Hampson make the point that AI is actually much less intelligent than many of us tend to think. An AI machine can be instructed to apply certain rules to decision making and can apply those rules even in quite complex situations, but the determination of those rules can only happen in one of two ways: either the rules must be invented or predetermined by whoever programmes the machine, or the rules must be observable to a “Large Language Model” AI when it scrapes the internet to observe common and typical aspects of human behaviour.

The former option, deciding the rules in advance, is by no means straightforward. Humans abide by a complex web of intersecting ethical codes, often slipping seamlessly between utilitarianism (what achieves the most amount of good for the most amount of people?) virtue ethics (what makes me a good person?) and theological or deontological ideas (what does God or wider society expect me to do?) This complexity, as Shadbolt and Hampson observe, means that:

“Contemporary intellectual discourse has not even the beginnings of an agreed universal basis for notions of good and evil, or right and wrong.”

The solution might be option two – to ask AI to do a data scrape of human behaviour and use its superior processing power to determine if there actually is some sort of universal basis to our ethical codes, perhaps one that humanity hasn’t noticed yet. For example, you might instruct a large language model AI to find 1,000,000 instances of a particular pro-social act, such as generous giving, and from that to determine a universal set of rules for what counts as generosity. This is an experiment that has not yet been done, probably because it is unlikely to yield satisfactory results. After all, what is real generosity? Isn’t the truly generous person one who makes a generous gesture even when it is not socially appropriate to do so? The rule of real generosity is that it breaks the rules.

Generosity is not the only human virtue which defies being codified – mercy falls at exactly the same hurdle. AI can never learn to be merciful, because showing mercy involves breaking a rule without having a different rule or sufficient cause to tell it to do so. Stealing is wrong, this is a rule we almost all learn from childhood. But in the famous opening to Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, a destitute convict, steals some silverware from Bishop Myriel who has provided him with hospitality. Valjean is soon caught by the police and faces a lifetime of imprisonment and forced labour for his crime. Yet the Bishop shows him mercy, falsely informing the police that the silverware was a gift and even adding two further candlesticks to the swag. Stealing is, objectively, still wrong, but the rule is temporarily suspended, or superseded, by the bishop’s wholly unruly act of mercy.

Teaching his followers one day, Jesus stunned the crowd with a catalogue of unruly instructions. He said, “Give to everyone who asks of you,” and “Love your enemies” and “Do good to those who hate you.” The Gospel writers record that the crowd were amazed, astonished, even panicked! These were rules that challenged many assumptions about the “right” way to live – many of the social and religious “rules” of the day. And Jesus modelled this unruly way of life too – actively healing people on the designated day of rest, dining with social outcasts and having contact with those who had “unclean” illnesses such as leprosy. Overall, the message of Jesus was loud and clear, people matter more than rules.

AI will never understand this, because to an AI people don’t actually exist, only rules exist. Rules can be programmed in manually or extracted from a data scrape, and one rule can be superseded by another rule, but beyond that a rule can never just be illogically or irrationally broken by a machine. Put more simply, AI can show us in a simplistic way what fairness ought to look like and can protect a judge from being punitive just because they are a bit hungry. There are many positive applications to the use of AI in overcoming humanity’s unconscious and illogical biases. But at the end of the day, only a human can look Jean Valjean in the eye and say, “Here, take these candlesticks too.”

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