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
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
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
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
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
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
Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. – Rowan Williams
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
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
To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context. – Rowan Williams
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
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
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
My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome. – 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. – Rowan Williams
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
