Rowan Williams
The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.Collection: Self
I have, by God’s grace, learned as a member of the Christian community what is the nature of God’s mercy, which does not leave me to overcome my sin by my own effort, so I have something to say to the fellow-sufferer who does not know where to look for hope. And what I have to say depends utterly on my willingness not to let go of that awareness of myself that reminds me where I start each day—not as a finished saint but as a needy person still struggling to grow.Collection: Christian
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.Collection: Religious
Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Compassion
If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.Collection: Country
Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.Collection: Brother
The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishnessCollection: Humanity
We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.Collection: Eye
I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had the about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.Collection: Sex
Nobody...likes talking about enforceable international protocols and yet unless there is a real change in attitude, we have to contemplate those very unwelcome possibilities if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions, of people to die.Collection: Attitude
We must support government coercion over enforcing international protocols and speed limits on motorways if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.Collection: Government
It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist; what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.Collection: Christian
The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Real
It's a moral question.Collection: Moral
Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.Collection: New Year
It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.Collection: Church
We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will "tolerate" us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints.Collection: Destiny
Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication.Collection: Communication