Rowan Williams quotes

Rowan Williams is an English theologian, poet, and former Archbishop of Canterbury. A leading intellectual in both religious and academic circles, his works span theology, philosophy, and social commentary. He continues to influence contemporary debates on religion and ethics. Here are 47 of his quotes:

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)
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow. View quote
Rowan Williams
A public is a necessary fiction. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation. (Rowan Williams)
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context. View quote
Rowan Williams
The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world. View quote
Rowan Williams
Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. View quote
Rowan Williams
In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's. View quote
Rowan Williams
One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest. (Rowan Williams)
A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
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. View quote
Rowan Williams
Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm. View quote
Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams - Image
Photo: Brian from Toronto, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0
Occupation: English Theologian
Born: June 14, 1950
Quotes count: 47
Wikipedia: Rowan Williams

Related authors

Justin Welby - thumbnail
Justin Welby  16 
English Clergyman
Joan D. Chittister  1 
 
John Sentamu - thumbnail
John Sentamu  9 
British Clergyman
Gene Robinson - thumbnail
Gene Robinson  18 
American Clergyman
George Carey - thumbnail
George Carey  26 
English Clergyman
John Milbank - thumbnail
John Milbank  3 
British Professor
N.T. Wright - thumbnail
N.T. Wright  67 
British Clergyman
Vincent Nichols - thumbnail
Vincent Nichols  9 
English Clergyman
Jonathan Sacks - thumbnail
Jonathan Sacks  100 
British Clergyman
Venerable Bede - thumbnail
Venerable Bede  6 
English Clergyman