Rowan Williams Quotes

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Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.

Rowan Williams

Making Love, Truth Is, Possible Love

Rowan Williams (1995). “A Ray of Darkness”, p.200, Cowley Publications

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The past is what the present is doing now.

Rowan Williams

Past

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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

Understanding, World, Way

Rowan Williams (2012). “Faith in the Public Square”, p.199, A&C Black

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I have, by God’s grace, learned as a member of the Christian community what is the nature of God’s mercy, which does not leave me to overcome my sin by my own effort, so I have something to say to the fellow-sufferer who does not know where to look for hope. And what I have to say depends utterly on my willingness not to let go of that awareness of myself that reminds me where I start each day—not as a finished saint but as a needy person still struggling to grow.

Rowan Williams

Christian, Letting Go, Struggle

Rowan Williams (2007). “Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another”, p.31, Shambhala Publications

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The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world.

Rowan Williams

People, Church, World

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The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

Rowan Williams

Self, Giving, Desire

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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.

Rowan Williams

Religious, Thinking, Long

Rowan Williams (2007). “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief”, p.50, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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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.

Rowan Williams

Integrity, Silence, Silence Is

Rowan Williams (2007). “Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another”, p.43, Shambhala Publications

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We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.

Rowan Williams

Letting Go, Self, Protected

Rowan Williams (2013). “Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral”, p.141, A&C Black

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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

Compassion, Community, Feelings

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I value unity because I believe we learn truth from each other in this process.

Rowan Williams

Truth, Believe, Unity

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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

God, Kindness, Encounters

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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

Country, Art, Years

"I don't come to it with a fixed agenda" by Rowan Williams, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2002.

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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

Eye, Journey, Order

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Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

Rowan Williams

Communication, Rooms, Grows

"This media tribe disfigures public life" by Rowan Williams, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2005.

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Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

Rowan Williams

Brother, Loneliness, Reality

Rowan Williams (1995). “A Ray of Darkness”, p.121, Cowley Publications

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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

Healthy, Trying, Limits

Rowan Williams (2013). “Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral”, p.137, A&C Black

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

Rowan Williams

Humanity, Selfishness, Used

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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

Marriage, Unique, Echoes

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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

Christian, Second Chance, Community

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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.

Rowan Williams

Long, Liberty, Essentials

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We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

Rowan Williams

Eye, Animal, Ecosystems

Rowan Williams (2012). “Faith in the Public Square”, p.188, A&C Black

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A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

Rowan Williams

Media, Maintenance, Common

"This media tribe disfigures public life" by Rowan Williams, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2005.

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Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.

Rowan Williams

Real, Media, People

"Rowan Williams says goodbye to Canterbury in BBC documentary" by Maev Kennedy, www.theguardian.com. December 28, 2012.

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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.

Rowan Williams

Thinking, One Direction, Temptation

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Born: June 14, 1950
Occupation: Poet
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