Rowan Williams Quotations

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.

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.

It would be a real failure if agreeing that it [abortion] was not an electoral issue provided an alibi for taking it seriously as a public issue.

It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.

Let's cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don't think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I've made mistakes - that's probably one of them.

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

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

A public is a necessary fiction.

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.

One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest.