Quotes from Rowan Williams

T. S. Eliot, faced with the glib modern claim that 'we know so much more than our ancestors', riposted, 'Yes; and they are what we know.

So baptism means being with Jesus 'in the depths': the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need – but also in the depths of God's love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.

It is no accident that a culture such as ours, which is alarmed by challenges to its self-evident superiority, is confused about the past, in some of the ways outlined in our first chapter.27 And it is a major irony that a culture determined to affirm diversity is so poorly equipped to understand the difference embodied in its own history, the distance between past ages and ours.

Disciples are expectant in the sense that they take it for granted that there is always something about to break through from the Master, the Teacher, something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape.

There is in every situation the possibility for the human intelligence to receive some kind of formation by the infinite intelligent act of God.

The death of Jesus breaks the chain between evil actions and evil consequences

The Eucharist is our symbol of what it would mean for the Lord's Prayer to be answered fully: God feeding his people through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which establishes that new community of the Spirit in which forgiveness is the common currency.

This life of utter givenness to God and the other, the neighbour, is already a life that death cannot contain.

Christians ought to be passionately and sacrificially concerned about the environment, for the very simple reason that we are called to be faithful to the future, even

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.

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.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

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.

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.

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.

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.

Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.