Why does our contemporary culture find it so hard to handle certain concepts and images? What aspects of the range of human possibilities have been lost in modernity and post-modernity? Rowan Williams argues that we have to let go of a number of crucial imaginative patterns - icons - for thinking about ourselves. He considers areas such as images of childhood, our awkwardness at speaking about community, our unwillingness to think seriously about remorse and our devastating lack of vocabulary for the growth and nurture of the self through time. This book by a master of contemporary thought sketches out a renewed language for the soul.