#rowan williams

[arcalek]

They are the best. Period.

[beguines]

Because the Old Testament isn't a story about things that God did in the way that Greek myth might be a story about things that Zeus did. It's not a biography of some heavenly individual doing stuff. It's a story of all these lives and histories touched by something utterly in excess of reality. You learn to talk about God by talking about them. And Jesus himself, in telling parables, doesn't give descriptions of God. He doesn't simply market ideas about God. He says, "There was a man who had two sons," or "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho," and you come sideways or slant into the reality, because that's how you avoid the temptation of tying it all up and being finished with it.

Rowan Williams in conversation with Shane McRae and James K.A. Smith

[icannotbewhoiwish]

[woundgallery]

“But for such a sick person, holiness is not an empty or irrelevant ideal. There is another kind of wholeness — a wholeness of identification with the needs of the world, the self-generated and self-perpetuating tortures of the human race — a wholeness of compassion, a catholicity of sympathy, knowing one’s own incompleteness in a way that reaches out to the incompleteness of others.” – Rowan Williams

[dzgrizzle]

“The Bible has no arguments for the existence of God. There are moments of conflict with God, anger with God, doubt about God's purposes, anguish and lostness when people have no real sense of God's presence. The Psalms are full of this, as is the Book of Job. Don't imagine that the Bible is full of comfortable and reassuring things about the life of belief and trust; it isn't. It is often about the appalling cost of letting God come near you and of trying to trust him when all the evidence seems to have gone.”

~  Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, in his book “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief”

[tonreihe]

“Balthasar’s form of negative theology is close to the fierce Lutheran conviction that it is only in that concrete otherness to God embodied in the abandonment of the crucified Messiah to death and hell that the divine difference, both within God and between God and the finite order, can be seen.”

—Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and difference,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology

[iscariotapologist]

Rowan Williams

[heresay]

Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.

Rowan Williams

[luxe-pauvre]

Science helps us live with our fragility by giving us a way of connecting with each other, recognising that it is the same world that we all live in. We have to forget our self-protective habits in order to discover our shared challenges. But what science alone does not do is build the motivation for a deeper level of connection. We act effectively not just when we find a language in common to identify problems, but when we recognise that those who share these challenges are profoundly like us, to the extent that we can to some degree feel their frailty as if it were ours – or at least, feel their frailty impacting directly on our own, so that we cannot be secure while they remain at risk. This is where art comes in. Like the sciences, it makes us shelve our self-oriented habits for a bit. Listening to music, looking at an exhibition, reading a novel, watching a theatre or television drama, we open doors to experiences that are not our own. If science helps us discover that there are things to talk about that are not determined just by the self-interest of the people talking, art opens us up to how the stranger feels, uncovering connections where we had not expected them.

Rowan Williams, The world feels fragile, but we can recover from the blows we’ve suffered

[rotgospels]

he gets it

[egipci]

[T]here can be no love without truth. Without clear vision, love is a business of projection and fantasy. And there can be no truth without love. Without trust and tenderness and courtesy, truth will vanish behind the walls of fear and pain... Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.

Rowan Williams, "Unveiled Faces."

[pilgrimjim]

The Paschal Wisdom of Holy Week

In the Garden, an icon by the hand of the artist, Angelica Sotiriou, 2009. I’m writing this on Maundy Thursday, the night of Jesus’ tender farewell supper with his friends—and the night he was handed over to malevolent powers. The beautiful icon from the hand of California sacred artist Angelica Soteriou [i] captures the wrenching moment between the solidarity of his loving community and the…

[beguines]

If poetry has nothing else to say, it says this: this world is much more peculiar than you imagine. There's more of it than you can get your head round in any one sentence, any one form of speech, any one rhythm of speech. There's always more. And that's a theological point, because it spills over into a sense that the world is there because of the extravagance, the excess of divine wisdom.

Rowan Williams in conversation with Shane McRae and James K.A. Smith

[benjaminasimpson]

"God Needs Our Silence"

Photo by Robert Arrington on Unsplash So often we try to convey or communicate the character and work of God to others by stepping up the noise and the activity; and yet for God to communicate who and what God is, God needs our silence. Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons, p. 98 We need preachers. We need activists. And we need contemplatives. We need persuaders and prophets…

[eannpatterson]

Virtual reality and economic injustice in a world with limits

It is sometimes suggested that materialism and greed are key drivers of our social and political system that largely refuses to acknowledge that we live in a world of limits.  However, Rowan Williams has proposed that we have a ‘culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal…

[tonreihe]

Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation