Abstract
It is rare that one comes across a book distinctive both in style and content, but this has been achieved by Kenneth Wilson, without, one suspects, his aiming to achieve anything of the sort. It arises from his involvement with the Templeton Foundation’s stimulus to a group of British scholars to establish the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham. Its overall aim is to contribute to the renewal of British character and virtues in the context of family, education and the professions. It is the last named of these which are the focus of engagement with gratitude as a virtue. A summary paragraph on p. 1 indicates what this might mean – gratitude inspiring us with a desire to enquire, sympathize and to care for others, the whole breadth of what we can be grateful for in all its intellectual, emotional and moral dimensions, indispensable to human flourishing. Whether any or all of this has been characteristically ‘British’ is neither here nor there, since what matters is what it needs to become or become again a normal aspect of our dealings with one another. It is acknowledged that there may be much to be learned both from Judaism and Islam in this respect (and by implication from a variety of cultures), but this volume tackles what can be elucidated for the present time.
Twelve chapters make the author’s case, and he is primarily concerned in recovering a sense of vocation in one’s personal and professional relationships, not least with an eye to the recovery of trust in professionals. The latter can include just about any identifiable group – from the media to those running transport systems, any group in fact which has to do with a community and its well-being, with high expectations of a group’s behaviour and the possibility of our educating one another to be more grateful. The framework for the whole is a Christian appreciation of ‘creation’ (p. 11), human beings in the ‘image of God’, gathering and generating insights as the book develops ‘into the loving nature of God and the potentially infectious vitality that it has to illuminate the intentional reality of personal and professional relationships’ (p. 11). The two sacraments to which the author gives some attention are Eucharist and Penance – ‘salvation for good’ being the focus (p.16). We can learn to understand the ‘self’; become response-able as we awaken compassion (central to gratitude, pp. 104–6), the desire to be of service, find the possibility of new beginnings, share what we know, not least stimulating curiosity, fascination both with the non-human environment which has given rise to us, the diversity of human societal structure, and foster hope, minus prejudice, ignorance and fear – a tall order indeed. Readers even as far as chapter 4 will have discovered the author’s willingness to deploy resources for understanding from whatever source. My personal favourites are in chapter 6 (p. 90), which includes a paragraph citing Luciano Guibbelei, a distinguished garden designer, and William Kendall (who revitalized the chocolate manufacture Green and Black and the Covent Garden Soup Company). It should also be noted that each chapter is richly satisfying in itself, but as the reader proceeds, the ‘conclusion’ at the end of each chapter helps pull the threads together. Some paragraphs provide reflection in and by themselves (e.g. p. 143 on ‘attention’). There is one chapter which may just possibly have come as something of a surprise to the author, given that he shows relatively little interest explicitly to the arts – though these indeed are given some importance in his text as his book progresses. But chapter 10 on ‘The Beauty of Holiness’ (which could possibly be rephrased as ‘The Holiness of Beauty’?) is particularly important, not least because under the heading of ‘The Revelatory Authority of Beauty’ he attends to health care, suggesting that ‘beauty lies at the core of the world’s life in the Being of God’ (p. 184). Even without the Christian framework which rightly pervades the text, there is much in this book which is profoundly illuminating about human relationships.