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The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. By Rowan Williams. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xiii + 204 pp. $34.00 (cloth).
The Edge of Words is Rowan Williams's first major book since leaving his role as Archbishop of Canterbury, and is a revision for publication of his 2013 Gifford Lectures given in Edinburgh. It is also, in his own words, an opportunity to work through "an assortment of questions and reflections jotted down over a number of years" (p. vi). These reflections focus on the nature of our language, and what our speaking implies about ourselves, our universe, and its ultimate context. It is an essay, true to the bequest behind the Giffords, in a certain sort of "natural theology." At the heart of these chapters is an argument, or at least a series of allusive provocations, that language is not a false or arbitrary construct pushed upon nature. Rather, it arises from a communicative intelligibility intrinsic to nature. Our speaking is at home in the world. More than this, it endlessly and generatively unfolds the world in representing it. This points beyond the world and our speech...