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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

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Rowan Williams
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 14
Anglican Priest
Poet
Politician
Professor
Theologian
Abertawe
Rowan Douglas Williams
Rowan Williams
Baron Williams of Oystermouth
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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.
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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.
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My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome.
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Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.
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Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
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Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's a moral question.
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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.
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Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.
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It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.
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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.
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I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had the about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.
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