109 Quotes by Rowan Williams

Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and – I dare to use the word – inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies.

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor – but the Church is not a campaign.

Let’s cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don’t think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I’ve made mistakes – that’s probably one of them.

The world’s creation has a beginning from the world’s point of view, not from God’s.

The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can’t leave, you are in effect a captive.

The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity’s selfishness.

Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: ‘If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.’ To be baptized into Jesus is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus’ first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since.

I have to go on being a priest and bishop, that is, to celebrate God and what God has done in Jesus, and to offer in God’s name whatever I can discern of God’s perspective on the world around – something which involves both challenge and comfort.

In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do – not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty.