Top 66 Rowan Williams Quotes
#1. The new humanity that is created around Jesus is not a humanity that is always going to be successful and in control of things, but a humanity that can reach out its hand from the depths of chaos, to be touched by the hand of God.
Rowan Williams
#2. 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.
Rowan Williams
#3. We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.
Rowan Williams
#4. And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.
Rowan Williams
#5. Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.
Rowan Williams
#6. Even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, 'One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people'.
Rowan Williams
#7. It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
Rowan Williams
#9. If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.
Rowan Williams
#10. In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.
Rowan Williams
#11. The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament.
Rowan Williams
#12. Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.
Rowan Williams
#13. What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.
Rowan Williams
#14. Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.
Rowan Williams
#15. I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.
Rowan Williams
#16. 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.
Rowan Williams
#17. Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication.
Rowan Williams
#18. A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.
Rowan Williams
#19. 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.
Rowan Williams
#20. In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.
Rowan Williams
#21. To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations.
Rowan Williams
#22. Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
Rowan Williams
#23. The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't.
Rowan Williams
#24. Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
Rowan Williams
#26. In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.
Rowan Williams
#27. So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.
Rowan Williams
#28. It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.
Rowan Williams
#29. I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith.
Rowan Williams
#30. The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's.
Rowan Williams
#31. Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. I can see the temptation of simply thinking, 'Well, there's a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it'. And that really won't do.
Rowan Williams
#32. [T]here is no goodness that is not bodily and realistic and local.
Rowan Williams
#33. We are called to show utter commitment to the God who is revealed in Jesus and to all those to whom His invitation is addressed.
Rowan Williams
#34. Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.
Rowan Williams
#35. Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.
Rowan Williams
#36. To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God's sons and daughters. Human
Rowan Williams
#37. It would be a real failure if agreeing that it [abortion] was not an electoral issue provided an alibi for taking it seriously as a public issue.
Rowan Williams
#38. At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen.
Rowan Williams
#39. Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.
Rowan Williams
#40. St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.
Rowan Williams
#41. How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?
Rowan Williams
#42. My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome.
Rowan Williams
#43. Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.
Rowan Williams
#44. Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.
Rowan Williams
#45. To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.
Rowan Williams
#46. 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.
Rowan Williams
#47. 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.
Rowan Williams
#48. The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world.
Rowan Williams
#49. Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.
Rowan Williams
#50. As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Rowan Williams
#51. Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners.
Rowan Williams
#52. To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context.
Rowan Williams
#53. A hermit said, "Do not judge an adulterer if you are chaste or you will break the law of God just as much as he does. For he who said 'Do not commit adultery' also said 'Do not judge.
Rowan Williams
#54. In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention.
Rowan Williams
#55. I value unity because I believe we learn truth from each other in this process.
Rowan Williams
#56. It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.
Rowan Williams
#57. One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest.
Rowan Williams
#58. Nobody ... likes talking about enforceable international protocols and yet unless there is a real change in attitude, we have to contemplate those very unwelcome possibilities if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions, of people to die.
Rowan Williams
#59. The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny.
Rowan Williams
#61. Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.
Rowan Williams
#62. Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.
Rowan Williams
#63. The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness
Rowan Williams
#64. I am pleased that Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles have decided to take this important step.
Rowan Williams
#65. A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.
Rowan Williams
#66. Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest.
Rowan Williams
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