Reporters had their hands full yesterday trying to figure out how to pull a “lede” out of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent Letter about the state of the Anglican Communion. He dumped cold water on everybody, so how to determine which side was wetter?
The view that has been expressed by all the Instruments of Communion in recent years is that interventions are not to be sanctioned. … [T]he risk is magnified of smaller and smaller groups taking to themselves the authority to decide on the adequacy of a neighbour’s ministerial life or spiritual authenticity. The gospels and the epistles of Paul alike warn us against a hasty final judgement on the spiritual state of our neighbours.
God thought humans were worth spending a lifetime with and all that spills over into how we see all kinds of human beings; the ones we don’t like or the ones we don’t reckon very much, the ones we don’t take very seriously.
– The Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, stops work at 6pm so he can watch The Simpsons with his family. He is more afraid of
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has not in any way endorsed the actions of the Primate of the Southern Cone, Bishop Gregory Venables, in his welcoming of dioceses, such as San Joaquin in the Episcopal Church, to become part of his province in South America.
To believe in an absolute religious truth is to believe that the object of my belief is not vulnerable to the contingencies of human history: God’s mind and character cannot be changed by what happens here in the world. God does not fail because I fail to persuade others or because my community fails to win some kind of power. In plain English, religious violence suggests religious insecurity.
One of the most distinctive things about these seminars has been the experience of sharing the study of each other’s sacred text. Because when that happens, I meet the other person not as a scholar, not as the representative of some alien set of commitments, but as someone seeking to open their mind and their heart to the self communication of God.
Is the Archbishop of Canterbury really cross in a graphic sort of way? Or is his homepage in need of a cleansing?
I just wonder a bit whether, you know, when an Archbishop condemns something, suddenly in, I don’t know, the bedsits of north London, somebody may say oh, I shouldn’t be having pre-marital sex, or in the cells of Al-Qaida, somebody says, goodness, terrorism’s wrong, the Archbishop says so. – Rowan Williams speaking in 2006
The blogosphere continues to debate the interview of the Archbishop of Canterbury with Emel, a Muslim lifestyle magazine published by The Times Online. Archbishop Rowan