Category Archives: Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams Bibliography: 1996-2000

[For some acknowledgments, and an important note, please see this post. See also 1972–1979 (with an explanation), 1980–1985, 1986-1990, and 1991-1995]

1996

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1996a     The Kingdom is Theirs: Five Reflections on the Beatitudes, London: Christian Socialist Movement; reissued 2002

Articles and Lectures

1996b     ‘Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.) Resurrection Reconsidered, Oxford: Oneworld Pubns, pp.87-101; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.183-196

1996c     ‘Forbidden Fruit: New Testament Sexual Ethics’; address delivered at Christ’s College, Cambridge; printed in Martyn Percy (ed.), Intimate Affairs: Spirituality and Sexuality in Perspective, London: DLT, pp.21-31

1996d     ‘Sacraments of the New Society’, in David Brown and Ann Loades (eds) Christ: The Sacramental Word – Incarnation, Sacrament, and Poetry, London: SPCK, pp.89-102; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.209-221

1996e     ‘Theological Perspectives’, in Gordon R Dunstan and Peter J Lachmann (eds) Euthanasia: Death, Dying and the Medical Duty (British medical bulletin 52.2), London: Royal Society of Medicine, pp.362-9

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1996f     ‘Church and State’ in Paul Barry Clarke and Andrew Linzey (eds.), Dictionary of Ethics, Theology, and Society, London: Routledge

1996g     ‘Jungfrauengeburt’ and ‘Soteriologie’ in Evangelisches KirchenlexiconViertier Band: S – Z, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht; English versions ‘Virgin Birth’ and ‘Soteriology’ in The Encyclopedia of Christianity 5: Si-Z, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008

Introductions and Forewords

1996h     ‘ Foreword’ in Tom and Barbara Butler, Just Spirituality in a World of Faiths, London: Mowbray

1996i     ‘Foreword’ in Melvyn Matthews, Rediscovering Holiness: The Search for the Sacred Today, London: SPCK

Book Reviews

1996j     Review of Sara Maitland, Big-Enough God, New York: Henry Holt, London: Mowbrays, 1995, Theology 99 (January – February), pp.59-60

1996k     Review of Elizabeth Stuart, Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships, London: Mowbrays, 1995, Theology & Sexuality 4 (March), pp.123-126
 
 

1997

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1997a     The Future of the Papacy – an Anglican View, Michael Richards Memorial Lecture, Oxford; Catholics for a Changing Church, pamphlet 12, London: Blackfriars Publications / Catholics for a Changing Church, 2000

Poetry

1997b     ‘Penrhys’ and ‘Curtains for Bosnia’, Image 16 (Summer), pp.62-64; reprinted in The Poems of Rowan Williams (2002).

Articles and Lectures

1997c     ‘Beyond Aesthetics: Theology and Hymnody’, Kenote address at the International Hymn Conference, in York, August 1997; printed in Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland Bulletin 213.15 (4), pp.73-78

1997d     ‘Gardens and Cities’, in David Clark (ed.) Changing World, Unchanging Church? An Agenda for Christians in Public Life, London: Mowbray, pp.48-50

1997e     ‘Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics’, Modern Theology 13 (January), pp.29-51; and in L Gregory Jones and James J Buckley(eds) Spirituality and Social Embodiment, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997, pp.29-51; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.239-264

1997f     ‘Knowing Myself in Christ’ in Timothy Bradshaw (ed.) The Way Forward: Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church, London: Hodder and Stoughton; 2 nd edition: 2003

1997g     ‘Minding the Gaps: Thoughts on the Education of the Spirit’, paper presented at the 7th National Training Conference for Chaplains in Further Education; published in Journal of Chaplaincy in Further Education 1.1 (Spring 2005), pp.3-7.

1997h     ‘Origen: Between Orthodoxy and Heresy’, in Walther Bienert and Uwe Kühneweg (eds) Origeniana Septima: Origenes in den Auseinandersetzungen des 4 Jahrhunderts, proceedings of the seventh international colloquium for Origen studies, 25-29 Aug 1997, Bibliothecum Ephemeridem Theologicarum Lovaniensum 137, Louvain: Leuven Univ Press / Peeters, 1999, pp.3-14; German translation ‘Origenes: ein Kirchenvater zwischen Orthodoxie und Häresie’ (trans. Peter Gemeinhardt), Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 2.1, 1998, p 49-64 (English abstract, p 64)

1997i     ‘Prophecy Today’, 1997 Las Casas lecture; published in Priests and People (now The Pastoral Review ), July 1998; available online at http://www.thepastoralreview.org/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?priestsppl-00034

Introductions and Forewords

1997j     ‘Foreword’, in C. Crowder (ed.) God and Reality: Essays on Christian Non-Realism, London: Mowbray, 1997, pp.v-ix

Book Reviews

1997k     Review of Gillian T W Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1996, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (October) 1997, pp.780-781

1997l     Review of David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, Theology 100 (March to April), pp.140-141

1997m     Review of Grace M Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge: CUP, 1995, Theology 100 (March – April), pp.132-133

1997n     ‘God is One and All Alone’, Review of Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement no 4925, p. 31 (22 Aug); available online at http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25371-1954389,00.html

1997o     ‘Acting on God’s behalf’, Review of NT Wright, Jesus and the victory of God, p.14, Church Times, 14 March
 
 

1998

Articles and Lectures

1998a     ‘Afterword: Making Differences’ in Lucy Gardner, David Moss, Ben Quash and Graham Ward (eds) Balthasar at the End of Modernity, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp.173-9; reprinted as ‘Balthasar and Difference’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.77-85

1998b     ‘On Being a Human Body’, Henry Cooper Lecture at the Lambeth Conference; published in Chrism: The St Raphael Quarterly 35.3 (August); reprinted in Sewanee Theological Review 42 (Michaelmas 1999), pp.403-413

1998c     ‘Being a People: Reflections on the Concept of the “Laity”’, paper delivered at a conference in Leeds University, June 30- July 3; printed in Reflection on the Laity: a Focus for Christian Dialogue between East and West = Religion, State & Society 27.1 (1999), pp.11-21

1998d     ‘Logic and spirit in Hegel’, in Phillip Blond (ed.) Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, London: Routledge, pp.116-130; reprinted in Wrestling with Angels, pp..35-52

1998e     ‘On Making Moral Decisions’ [plenary session, Lambeth Conference, July 22 1998], published in Sewanee Theological Review 42 (Easter), pp.147-158; and Anglican Theological Review 81 (Spring), pp.295-308; revised in Robin Gill (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics, Cambridge: CUP, 2001, pp.3-15

1998f     ‘New Words for God: Contemplation and Religious Writing’, in Thomas Merton: Poet, Monk, Prophet; Papers presented at the Second General Conference of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland at Oakham School, March 1998, Abergavenny: Three Peaks Press

1998g     ‘Troubled Breasts: The Holy Body in Hagiography’, paper delivered at a conference at the University of Wales, Cardiff; printed in Jan Willem Drijvers and John W. Watt (ed.) Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 137, Leiden: E J Brill, 1999, pp.63-78

1998h     ‘Tyndale and the Christian Society’, 5 th Annual Tyndale Society Lambeth Lecture; published in Tyndale Society Bulletin 12 (1999), pp.38-49, reprinted in Anglican Identities, pp.9-23

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1998i     ‘Alexander von Alexandrien’ and ‘Athanasius’ in Hans Dieter Betz et al (eds) Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edition, vol.1, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck

1998j     ‘Arianism’ in Everett Fergusson, Michael McHugh, and Frederick Norris (eds) The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, N.Y. and London: Garland, 2nd edn

1998k     ‘Justification’ and ‘Péché’ in Jean-Ives Lacoste (ed.), Dictionnaire critique de théologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998 (2 nd edition, 2002; third, 2007); translated as ‘Justification’ and ‘Sin’ in Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, New York, Routledge: 2004

1998l     ‘Simone Weil’ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

1998m     ‘Is Blair still a Christian Socialist?’, New Statesman, 25 September

1998n     ‘No life here – no joy, terror or tears’ (Response to Bishop Spong’s statement), Church Times, 17 July

1998o     ‘Whatever happened to all the hope?’, Church Times, 1 May, p.12

Introductions and Forewords

1998p     ‘Foreword’ in Colin Coward (ed.) TheOther Way: Anglican Gay and Lesbian Journeys, London: Changing Attitude

1998q     ‘Foreword’ in Tarjei Park, The English Mystics: An Anthology, London: SPCK
 
 

1999

Books (edited and translated)

1999a     (ed. and tr.) Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1999b     The Apocalyptic and the Charismatic in Early Monastic Literature: the Case of the Letter of Ammonas, lecture on receiving Dr. Theol. honoris causa (introduced by Brennecke H C), published as Faith and Experience in Early Monasticism: New Perspectives on the Letter of Ammonas / Laudatio und Festvortrag anlässlich der Ehrenpromotion von Rowan Douglas Williams durch die Theologische Fakultät der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg am 02.07.1999 in der Aula des Erlanger Schlosses, Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek: Erlangen-Nürnberg Friedrich-Alexanders-Universität, Erlangen

1999c     Room for the Spirit: Thoughts on Spiritual Values and Bodily Persons, National Society’s RE Centre, Annual Lecture; London: National Society (Church of England) for promoting Religious Education

1999d     ‘To Stand where Christ Stands’, in Ralph Waller and Benedicta Ward (ed.)Introduction to Christian Spirituality, London: SPCK, pp.1-13

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1999e     ‘Christologie II.1: Alte Kirche’ in Hans Dieter Betz et al (eds) Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edition, vol.2, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck

1999f     (i) ‘Creation’ and (ii) ‘Trinitate, de’ in Allan Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

Introductions and Forewords

1999g     ‘Foreword’ in Philip Crowe, Strange Design: Exploring the Ways of God in the World, Canterbury: Norwich

1999h     ‘Foreword’ in John Davies, Be Born in us Today: The Message of the Incarnation for Today, Canterbury: Norwich

Book Reviews

1999i     Review of David Martin, Does Christianity Cause War?, Oxford: Clarendon, 1997, in Journal of Contemporary Religion 14.1, (January), pp.148–150

1999j     Review of ‘Books’ with Conor Gearty, Keith Mitchell and Elizabeth Longford, The Tablet 253, no 8291, pp.990-3

Interviews

1999k     ‘Quarrying for God’, interview with Roland Ashby, Anglican Media, The Melbourne Anglican, Australia, March, http://www.prayerbook.ca/cann/1999/03/pblam110.htm

Other

1999l     ‘To Augustine’ [Letters at the End of the Millennium], broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 31 December; transcript: http://cargo.ship-of-fools.com/Features00/Features/Millennium2.html
 
 

2000

Books

2000a     Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgement, London: Fount

2000b     Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2002; Reissued: London: Continuum, 2003

2000c     On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Oxford /Malden, Mass: Blackwell

Lectures and Articles

2000d     ‘Hooker the Theologian’, Lecture delivered at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; printed in Journal of Anglican Studies, 1.1 (2003), pp.103-116; reprinted in Anglican Identities, pp.24-39

2000e     ‘Insubstantial Evil’, in George Lawless and Robert Dodaro (eds) Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, London, New York: Routledge, pp.105-123

2000f     ‘The Seal of Orthodoxy: Mary and the Heart of Christian Doctrine’ lecture at a day conferences organized by the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk; published in Martin Warner (ed.), Say Yes to God: Mary and the Revealing of the Word Made Flesh, London: Tufton

2000g     ‘The Sermon’, lecture delivered at the 10th anniversary conference of Affirming Catholicism, Durham, September 2000, published in Stephen Conway (ed.) Living the Eucharist: Affirming Catholicism and the Liturgy, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2001, pp.44-55

Sermons and Speeches

2000h     Sermon delivered at enthronement service as Archbishop of Wales, St Woolos Cathedral, Newport, 26 February; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.7-14

2000i     ‘Presidential Address’ [to Church in Wales Governing Body], 27 April; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r01.html; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.15-22

2000j     ‘Reaffirming the Value of the Child’ [Sermon following publication of the Waterhouse Report], May 2000; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r02.html; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.23-31

2000k     ‘Ascension Day 2000’, sermon; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r03.html

2000l     ‘Presidential Address’ [to Church in Wales Governing Body], 21 September; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r04.html; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.33-40

2000m     ‘Advent Message 2000’; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r05.html; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.41-42

2000n     Sermon, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10 December; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r06.html

2000o     ‘Christmas Message 2000’; available online at http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/bishops/sermonsr/r07.html; printed in Addresses and Sermons/Areithiau a Phregethau, pp.43-44

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

2000p     (i) ‘Catholicity’, (ii) ‘Resurrection’ and (iii) ‘Russian Christian thought’ in Adrian Hastings (ed.), Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, New York: Oxford

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

2000q     ‘Banking without Barclays’, The Guardian, April 6, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/apr/06/ruralaffairs.comment

2000r     ‘Our Differences Need Not Destroy Us’, The Tablet 254, no 8328, April 8, p.476; reproduced online at http://copies.anglicansonline.org/tablet/tablet000408a.html

2000s     ‘Wanted: Imaginative, Attentive, Ideological, Inspirational Mediators’, Church Times, 6 Oct 2000

2000t     ‘Telling that Christmas story like it is’, The Guardian, December 23, http://education.guardian.co.uk/xmas2000/story/0,,416133,00.html

Introductions and Forewords

2000u     ‘Foreword’ in Douglas Davies, Private Passions: Betraying Discipleship on the Journey to Jerusalem, Norwich: Canterbury Press

2000v     ‘Foreword’ in Michael Doe, Seeking the Truth in Love: The Church and Homosexuality, London: DLT

2000w     ‘Preface’ in Mike Endicott, Healing at the Well, Bradford on Avon: Terra Nova

2000x     ‘Foreword’ in Una Kroll, Forgive and Live, London: Mowbray

Book Reviews

2000y     Review of ‘Books’ with Lavinia Byrne, Michael Walsh, Fergus Kerr, Henry Wansbrough, Rosalie Osmond, Gemma Simmonds, Bernard Green, Lucy Lethbridge and Alban McCoy, The Tablet 254, no 8336, pp.792-9

Interviews

2000z     Interview, Greenbelt Festival; edited text published as ‘The Lambeth Talk’, http://www.surefish.co.uk/news/features/2003/rowan2.htm
 
 

Rowan Williams Bibliography: 1991–1996

[For some acknowledgments, and an important note, please see this post. See also 1972–1979 (with an explanation), 1980–1985, and 1986-1990]

[Edit: Updated, 6 July – I’d left off the items that are now 1991b and 1993a.]

1991

Books

1991a     Teresa of Avila, Outstanding Christian thinkers, London: Geoffrey Chapman / Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse; re-issued London / New York: Continuum, 2000

Books (edited and translated)

1991b     (tr. with Brian McNeil, Andrew Louth, John Saward and Oliver Davies) Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol.5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, Edinburgh: T&T Clark / San Francisco: Ignatius

Articles and Lectures

1991c     ‘The Filioque and the Immanent Trinity: Some Notes’, paper presented at the International Commission of the Anglican/Orthodox Theological Dialogue, Oxford 1991

1991d     ‘Imagining the Kingdom: Some Questions for Anglican Worship Today’, in Kenneth Stevenson and Bryan Spinks (eds) The Identity of Anglican Worship, Harrisburg, Penn: Morehouse Pub, pp.1-13

1991e     ‘“Know Thyself”: What Kind of an Injunction?’, paper delivered at Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference, Liverpool; printed in Michael McGhee (ed.) Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 32, Cambridge: CUP, 1992, pp.211-227

1991f     ‘Teaching the Truth’, presented at Affirming Theology conference; reprinted in Jeffrey John (ed.) Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992, pp.29-43

1991g     ‘Theological Integrity’, New Blackfriars 72 (March), pp.140-51; adapted in Cross Currents 45.3 (Fall 1995), pp.312-325; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.3-15

1991h     Review article on Peter Winch, Simone Weil: The Just Balance, Cambridge: CUP, 1989, Philosophical Investigations 14.2 (April), pp.155-171

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1991i     ‘The Bible’, in I. Hazlett(ed.) Early Christianity: Origins and Evolution to AD 600; in Honour of WC Frend, London: SPCK / Nashville: Abingdon Press, pp.81-91

1991j     (i) ‘European Theology’ and (ii) ‘Jesus Christ’ in Nicholas Lossky et al. (eds.), Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, Geneva: WCC / Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; see also 2nd edn, 2003

Book Reviews

1991k     Review of Hans Küng, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology, New York: Crossroad, 1988, Journal of Theological Studies ns 42.1 (April), pp.403-406

1991l     Review of GG Meersseman, Capitules du Diurnal de Saint-Denis: Cod. Verona cap. LXXXVIII Saec IX, Spicilegium Friburgense 30, Fribourg Suisse: Editions Universitaires, 1987, Journal of Theological Studies ns 42.1 (April), pp.370-372

1991m     Review of Robert Strèauli, Origenes der Diamantene, Zurich: ABZ, 1987, Journal of Theological Studies ns 42.1 (April), pp.336-337
 
 

1992

Articles and Lectures

1992a     ‘The Need for a Christian Critique of National Messianism’ [Reply to Z Krakhmal’nikova and S Lezov, pp 7-47], Religion, State & Society 20.1 1992, pp.57-59

1992b     ‘The Nicene Heritage’, in James M. Byrne (ed.) Christian Understanding of God Today: Theological Colloquium on the Occasion of the 400th Anniversary of the Foundation of Trinity College, Dublin, (March 1992), Dublin: Columba, 1993, pp.45-48

1992c     ‘Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision’, New Blackfriars 73.861 (June), p.319-26; reprinted as ‘A Theological Critique of Milbank’ in Robin Gill, Theology and Sociology: A Reader, London: Cassell, 2 nd edn.

1992d     Review Article on ‘R P C Hanson’s Search for the Christian Doctrine of God‘, Scottish Journal of Theology 45.1, pp.101-111

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1992e     ‘Methodios von Olympos’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed G Müller, vol. XXII, Berlin / New York, de Gruyter, pp.680-85

Book Reviews

1992f     Review of Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, Modern Theology 8.3 (July), pp.305-307
 
 

1993

Articles and Lectures

1993a     ‘“Adult Geometry”: Dangerous Thoughts in R.S. Thomas’ in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), The Page’s Drift: R.S. Thomas at Eighty, Bridgend: Seren Books

1993b     ‘Baptism and the Arian controversy’, in Michel Barnes and Daniel Williams (eds) Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth-Century Trinitarian Conflict, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, pp.149-180

1993c     ‘Catholic and Reformed’, paper presented at Gloucester Cathedral to mark formal launch of Affirming Catholicism in the diocese; abridged version published in Affirming Catholicism journal (Autumn)

1993d     ‘Catholic Persons: Images of Holiness: A Dialogue’ (with Philip Sheldrake) in Jeffrey John (ed.)Living the Mystery: Affirming Catholicism and the Future of Anglicanism; Talks and Dialogies from the 2 nd National Conference of Affirming Catholicism, 1993, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994, pp.76-89

1993e     ‘Damnosa Haereditas: Pamphilus’ Apology and the Reputation of Origen’, in Hanns Christof Brennecke, Ernst Ludwig Grasmuck and Chritsoph Markschies (eds) Logos: Festschrift Fur Luise Abramowski Zum 8. Juli 1993 (Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Fur Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, ed. Erich Gräßer, Band 67), Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, pp.151-169

1993f     ‘Doctrinal criticism: some questions’, in Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin (ed.) The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.239-264; reprinted as ‘Maurice Wiles and Doctrinal Criticism’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.275-299

1993g     ‘Hooker: Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary’, paper presented at a conference marking the completion of the Folger edition; published in Arthur McGrade (ed.) Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 165, Washington, Tempe, Az: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997, pp.369-383; reprinted in Anglican Identities, pp.40-56

1993h     ‘Inside Herbert’s Afflictions‘, lecture delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge; printed in Anglican Identities, pp.57-72

1993i     ‘Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion’, in Lionel Wickham and Caroline Hammond Bammel (eds) Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity: Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead, Ely Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge (1971-1980), in Celebration of his Eightieth Birthday, 9th April 1993, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae ed. J. den Boeft et al, 19, Leiden: E J Brill, pp.227-246

1993j     ‘The Necessary Non-existence of God’, in Richard H. Bell (ed.)Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings towards a Divine Humanity, Cambridge: CUP, pp.52-76; reprinted as ‘Simone Weil and the Necessary Non-existence of God’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.203-227

1993k     ‘Visible Unity’, in Colin Davey (ed)Returning Pilgrims: Insights from British and Irish participants in the Fifth World Faith and Order Conference, Santiago de Compostela, 3-14 August 1993, London: Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, 1994 pp.12-14

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1993l     ‘Agennesia’ and ‘Arius, Arianismus’ in Walter Kasper (ed.) Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 1, Freiburg: Herder, p.230

1993m     ‘Eastern Orthodox Theology’ in Alister E. McGrath (ed.), Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell

Introductions and Forewords

1993n     ‘Foreword’ in Jill Evans, Beloved and Chosen: Women of Faith, Norwich: Canterbury

Book Reviews

1993o     Review of Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev, 1893-1966, Cambridge: CUP, 1989, Journal of Theological Studies ns 44 (April), pp.443-446

1993p     Review of Tim Vivian, St Peter of Alexandria, Bishop and Matyr, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity, Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1988, Journal of theological studies 44,.1 (April), p. 352-55
 
 

1994

Books

1994a     Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses, London: Darton, Longman & Todd; American edition: A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections, Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 1995

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1994b     Mission and Christology, J C Jones Memorial Lecture 1994, Brynmawr: Welsh Members Council, Church Mission Society

Poetry

1994c     After Silent Centuries, Oxford: Perpetua Press; all poems subsequently included in The Poems of Rowan Williams (2002).

Articles and Lectures

1994d     ‘“Good for Nothing”? Augustine on Creation’, Augustinian Studies 25, pp.9-24

1994e     ‘Heaven and Hell: A Modern Embarrassment’, Epworth Review 21.2 (May), pp.15-20

1994f     ‘Reply: Redeeming Sorrows’, paper presented at 15 th annual conference on philosophy of religion, Claremont, February; printed in DZ Phillips (ed.) Religion and Morality, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996, pp.132-148; revised version printed as ‘Redeeming Sorrows: Marilyn McCord Adams and the Defeat of Evil’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.255-274

Introductions and Forewords

1994g     ‘Foreword’ in Rob Marshall, The Transfiguration of Jesus, London: DLT
 
 

1995

Articles and Lectures

1995a     ‘Angels Unawares: Heavenly Liturgy and Earthly Theology in Alexandria’, Studia Patristica (Papers presented at the 12 th International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford) 30, Leuven: Peeters, 1997, pp.350-363

1995b     ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose’, Modern Theology 11 (January), pp.3-22; reprinted in Wrestling with Angels, pp.53-76

1995c     ‘Ethik und Rechtfertigung’, in Michael Beintker, Ernstpeter Maurer, Heinrich Stoevesandt and Hans G Ulrich (eds)Rechtfertigung und Erfahrung: für Gerhard Sauter zum 60. Geburtstag, Gütersloh, Germany: Christian Kaiser, 1995, pp.311-327; English version incorporated as sections 1-3 in 1997 ‘Interiority and Epiphany’

1995d     ‘Theology and the Churches’, in Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall (eds)Michael Ramsay as Theologian, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, pp.9-28; reprinted in Anglican Identities, pp.87-102

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1995e     ‘Origenes, Origenismus’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed G Müller, vol. XXV, Berlin / New York, de Gruyter, pp.397-421

1995f     ‘Religious Experience in the Era of Reform’, in JL Houlden and Peter Byrne (eds) Companion Encyclopedia of Theology, London, New York: Routledge, pp.576-593 (0415064473)

Introductions and Forewords

1995g     ‘Foreword’ in James Alison, Knowing Jesus, New Edition, London: SPCK

1995h     ‘Foreword’ in Athanasius, The Coptic Life of Antony, ed. and trans. Tim Vivian, San Francisco: International Scholars Publications

1995i     ‘Foreword’ in Henry McAdoo and Kenneth Stevenson, The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Anglican Tradition, Norwich: Canterbury, 1995, pp.

Book Reviews

1995j     Review of Aidan Nichols, Scribe of the Kingdom: Essays on Theology and Culture, London: Sheed & Ward, 1994, New Blackfriars 76 (April), pp.203-205

1995k     Review of Adrian Thatcher, Liberating Sex: a Christian Sexual Theology, London: SPCK, 1993, Theology 98 (January – February), pp.70-72

Interviews

1995l     ‘Time and Transformation: A Conversation with Rowan Williams’ (interview by Todd Breyfogle), Cross Currents 45.3 (Fall), pp.293-311
 
 

1996

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1996a     The Kingdom is Theirs: Five Reflections on the Beatitudes, London: Christian Socialist Movement; reissued 2002

Articles and Lectures

1996b     ‘Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.) Resurrection Reconsidered, Oxford: Oneworld Pubns, pp.87-101; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.183-196

1996c     ‘Forbidden Fruit: New Testament Sexual Ethics’; address delivered at Christ’s College, Cambridge; printed in Martyn Percy (ed.), Intimate Affairs: Spirituality and Sexuality in Perspective, London: DLT, pp.21-31

1996d     ‘Sacraments of the New Society’, in David Brown and Ann Loades (eds) Christ: The Sacramental Word – Incarnation, Sacrament, and Poetry, London: SPCK, pp.89-102; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.209-221

1996e     ‘Theological Perspectives’, in Gordon R Dunstan and Peter J Lachmann (eds) Euthanasia: Death, Dying and the Medical Duty (British medical bulletin 52.2), London: Royal Society of Medicine, pp.362-9

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1996f     ‘Church and State’ in Paul Barry Clarke and Andrew Linzey (eds.), Dictionary of Ethics, Theology, and Society, London: Routledge

1996g     ‘Jungfrauengeburt’ and ‘Soteriologie’ in Evangelisches KirchenlexiconViertier Band: S – Z, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht; English versions ‘Virgin Birth’ and ‘Soteriology’ in The Encyclopedia of Christianity 5: Si-Z, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008

Introductions and Forewords

1996h     ‘ Foreword’ in Tom and Barbara Butler, Just Spirituality in a World of Faiths, London: Mowbray

1996i     ‘Foreword’ in Melvyn Matthews, Rediscovering Holiness: The Search for the Sacred Today, London: SPCK

Book Reviews

1996j     Review of Sara Maitland, Big-Enough God, New York: Henry Holt, London: Mowbrays, 1995, Theology 99 (January – February), pp.59-60

1996k     Review of Elizabeth Stuart, Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships, London: Mowbrays, 1995, Theology & Sexuality 4 (March), pp.123-126
 
 

Rowan Williams Bibliography: 1986–1990

[For some acknowledgments, and an important note, please see this post. See also 1972–1979 (and an explanation), and 1980–1985]

[Edit: Updated, 6 July – I’d left off what is now 1986a.]

1986

Books (edited and translated)

1986a     (tr. with Andrew Louth, John Saward and Martin Simon) Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, Edinburgh: T&T Clark / San Francisco: Ignatius

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1986b     (ed. with Terry Tastard and Janet Morley) Poverty, Obedience and Chastity: A Re-appraisal, Jubilee Group Easter Lectures 1986, London: The Jubilee Group; including ‘Poverty’, pp.1-13

Articles and Lectures

1986c     ‘Arius and the Meletian Schism’, Journal of Theological Studies ns 37.1 (April), pp.35-52

1986d     ‘Balthasar and Rahner’, in John Riches (ed.) The Analogy of Beauty, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, pp.11-34; reproduced as ‘Balthasar, Rahner and the Apprehension of Being’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.86-105

1986e     ‘Barth, War and the State’, Oxford Conference in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, 18-21 September; reprinted in Nigel Biggar (ed.) Reckoning with Barth, Oxford: Mowbray, 1988 pp.170-190; reproduced in Wrestling with Angels, pp.150-171

1986f     ‘Introductory Memoir’ in Geoffrey Paul, A pattern of faith: An exposition of Christian doctrine, Worthing: Churchman

1986g     ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De doctrina’, paper presented at The Sacred Word: Religious Theories of Language conference, Department of Religious Studies, University of Lancaster, in July; published in Literature and Theology 3.2 (July 1989), pp.138-150

1986h     ‘Trinity and Revelation’, Modern Theology 2.3 (April), pp.197-212; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.131-147

Book Reviews

1986i     Review of Anthony Kenny, A Path from Rome: An Autobiography, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985, Theology 89 (May), pp.237-238

1986j     Review of Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of an Ancient Religion, San Francisco: Harper & Row / Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1983, Journal of Theological Studies ns 37.1 (April), pp.202-206

1986k     Review of Simon Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality, London: DLT, 1984, New Blackfriars 67 (799) (November), pp.501-2

Other

1986k     Anglicans and Racism: The Balsall Heath Consultation – Address, Reports and Recommendations, Race, Pluralism and Community Group, London: Board for Social Responsibility (I am not sure what contribution RW made.)
 
 

1987

Books

1987a     Arius: Heresy and Tradition, London: Darton, Longman, and Todd; revised edition: London: SCM, 2001 / Grand Rapids, Mich: WB Eerdmans, 2002 (see 2001f     below)

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1987b     Star wars, safeguard or threat?: a Christian perspective, Cana occasional papers, 1, Norton, Evesham, Worcs: Clergy Against Nuclear Arms, 1987

Articles and Lectures

1987c     ‘The Nature of a Sacrament’, in John Greenhalgh and Elizabeth Russell (eds)Signs of faith, hope, and love, London: St Mary’s, Bourne Street, pp.32-44; reprinted in On Christian theology, pp.197-208

1987d     ‘On doing theology’ (with James Atkinson) and ‘Jesus – God with us’ (with Richard Bauckham) in Christina Baxter (ed.) Stepping stones: Joint essays on Anglican Catholic and Evangelical unity, London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp.1-20, 21-41

1987e     ‘Politics and the soul: A reading of the City of God‘, Milltown Studies 19/20

1987f     ‘Postmodern Theology and the Judgment of the World’, paper delivered at Trinity Institute, New York in January, published in F.B. Burnham(ed.) Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, San Francisco: Harper & Row, pp.92-112; reprinted as ‘The Judgment of the World’ in On Christian Theology, pp.29-43

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1987g     ‘Jesus Christus II: Alte Kirche’ and ‘Jesus Christus III” Mittelalter’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed G Müller, vol. XVI, Berlin / New York, de Gruyter, pp.726-59

Book Reviews

1987h     Review of Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones et Dubia, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1982, Journal of Theological Studies ns 38.1 (April), pp.225-227
 
 

1988

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1988a     Christianity and the Ideal of Detachment, Lingdale paper 12, Frank Lake Memorial Lecture 1988, Oxford: Clinical Theology Association, 1989

Articles and Lectures

1988b     ‘Nobody Knows Who I Am Till the Judgement Morning’, in Deborah Duncan Honoré (ed.) Trevor Huddleston: Essays on his Life and Work, Oxford: OUP, pp.135-151; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.276-289

1988c     ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer’, in Richard Bell (ed.) Grammar of the Heart: New essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, San Francisco: Harper and Row, pp.36-53; reproduced in Wrestling with Angels, pp.186-202

Introductions and Forewords

1988d     ‘Introduction’ in Ashley Beck and Ros Hunt, Speaking Love’s Name: Homosexuality, Some Catholic and Socialist Reflections, London: Jubilee Group; reproduced online at http://www.anglocatholicsocialism.org/lovesname.html

1988e     ‘Foreword’ in Oliver Davies, God Within: The Mystical Tradition of Northern Europe, New York: Paulist; London: DLT

Book Reviews

1988f     Review of Gerald Bonner, God’s Decree and Man’s Destiny: Studies on the Thought of Augustine of Hippo, Collected Studies 255, London: Variorum Reprints, 1987, Journal of Theological Studies ns 39.2 (October), p.669

1988g     Review of Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, New Left Review 170 (July-August), 118-23

1988h     Review of Dewi Z Phillips, R S Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God. Meaning and Mediation in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986, Journal of Theological Studies ns 39.2 (October), pp.653-655

1988i     Review of Christopher Stead, Substance and Illusion in the Christian Fathers, Collected Studies 224, London: Variorum Reprints, 1985, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39.4 (October), pp.627-628
 
 

1989

Books (edited and translated)

1989a     (tr. with Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, and John Saward) Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol.4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, Edinburgh: T&T Clark / San Francisco: Ignatius

1989b     (ed.) The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, Cambridge, New York: CUP, including (i) ‘Preface’ and (ii) ‘Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?’, pp.vii-xii, 1-23

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1989c     The Body’s Grace, 10 th Michael Harding memorial address, London: Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement; also available at http://www.iconservatives.org.uk/bodys_grace.htm; also in Charles C. Hefling (ed.) Our selves, our souls and bodies, Boston: Cowley Pubns, Second Edition, 2002, pp.58-68; also in Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (ed.) Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, pp.309-321

1989d     Faith in the University, 5 th Annual Lecture, Leicester: Loughborough University and Colleges, Anglican Chaplaincy, AVS, Loughborough University; reprinted (revised?) in Simon Robinson and Clement Katulushi (eds), Values in HigherEducation, Glamorgan: Aureus Publishing/University of Leeds, pp.24-35

1989e     (ed. with Ian Swanson and Alison J. Elliot) The Renewal of Social Vision, Occasional Paper 17, Edinburgh: Centre for Theology and Public Issues, including ‘Christian Resources for the Renewal of Vision’, pp.2-7

1989f     Violence, Society and the Sacred, a lecture delivered at St. Antony’s College, Oxford on 26 October 1989, OPPS paper 18, Oxford: Oxford Project for Peace Studies, 1989; reproduced as ‘Girard on Violence, Society and the Sacred’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.171-185

Articles and Lectures

1989g     ‘Ascetic Enthusiasm: Origen and the early Church’, History Today 39.12 (December), pp.31-37

1989h     ‘The Ethics of SDI’, in Richard J. Bauckham and R. John Elford (eds)The Nuclear Weapons Debate: Theological and Ethical Issues, London: SCM, pp.162-174; see also 1987b     

1989i     ‘God and Risk (2)’ in Holloway, R. (ed.) The Divine Risk, London: DLT, 1996 (© 1989)

1989j     ‘Incarnation and Social Vision – a New Look at an Old Theme’, Gore Lecture for 1989, Theology Wales (winter), pp.24-40; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.225-238

1989k     ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma’ in Robert Morgan (ed.) The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, pp.85-98; reprinted as ‘Beginning with the Incarnation’ in On Christian Theology, pp.79-92

1989l     ‘On Being Creatures’, 4 th Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture, Westminster Abbey; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.63-78

1989m     ‘Resurrection and Peace’, Theology 92 (November), pp.481-490; reprinted in Robin Gill (ed.), Readings in Modern Theology, London: SPCK, pp.306-16; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.265-275

1989n     ‘Trinity and Ontology’, in Kenneth Surin (ed.) Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, Cambridge: CUP, pp.71-92; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.148-166

1989o     ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’, New Blackfriars 70.824 (February), pp.85-95; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.16-28

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1989p     ‘Eastern Orthodox theology’, in David Ford (ed.) The Modern Theologians, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.152-170; revised in the 2 nd edn, 1997 and the 3 rd, 2005

Sermons and Speeches

1989q     ‘Penance in the Penitentiary’, address given in Grendon Prison, March; printed in New Life 7, pp.25-34; reprinted in Theology 95 (March/April 1992), pp.88-96

Book Reviews

1989r     Review of Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, and Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, New York: Random House, 1988, Theology 92 (July), pp.338-341

1989s     Review of Jean Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985, Scottish Journal of Theology 42.1, pp.101-105
 
 

1990

Articles and Lectures

1990a     ‘The Finality of Christ’, in Mary Kelly (ed.) Christology and Religious Pluralism: In Memoriam Charlotte Klein, London: Sisters of Our Lady of Sion, pp.21-38; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.93-106

1990b     ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, presented at The Shadow of Spirit: Contemporary Western Thought and its Religious Subtexts conference, King’s College Cambridge; reprinted in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds) Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, London: Routledge, 1992, pp.72-80; reprinted in Wrestling with Angels, pp.25-34

1990c     ‘Der Literalsinn der Heiligen Schrift’, Evangelische Theologie 50.1, pp.55-71; English version: ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture’, Modern Theology 7 (January 1991), pp.121-134; reprinted as ‘The Discipline of Scripture’ in On Christian Theology, pp.44-59

1990d     ‘Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in Ian Ker and Alan Hill (eds) Newman after a Hundred Years, Oxford: OUP, pp.263-285

1990e     ‘The Paradoxes of Self-knowledge in De trinitate‘, paper presented at Marquette University, November; printed in Joseph T. Lienhard, Earl C. Muller and Roland J. Teske (eds) Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, Collectanea Augustiniana, ed. Joseph C. Shnaubelt, Frederick Van Fleteren, New York: Peter Lang, 1993, pp.121-134

1990f     ‘Sapientia and the Trinity: reflections on De trinitate’, in Bernard Bruning, Mathijs Lamberigts and J van Houtem (eds) Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T J van Bavel, vol 1, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium XCII-A, Louvain: Leuven University Press, pp.317-332

1990g     ‘Trinity and Pluralism’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.)Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Faith Meets Faith Series, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp.3-15; reprinted in On Christian Theology, pp.3-15

1990h     ?paper in Affirming Catholicism, Papers given at the Affirming Catholicims Conference at St. Alban’s, Holborn on Saturday 9 June 1990

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

1990i     ‘Onward Christian Soldiers?’, The Guardian, Nov 1; reprinted in Manchester Guardian Weekly 143.19, Nov 11, and as ‘War in the Gulf: can it be “just”?’ in Christianity and Crisis: A Christian Journal of Opinion 50.18 (December) 17, pp.391-392

Introductions and Forewords

1990j     ‘Foreword’ in John Saward, The Mysteries of March: Hans Urs Von Balthasar on the Incarnation and Easter, London: HarperCollins

Book Reviews

1990k     Review of Hubertus R Drobner, Person-Exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus: Zur Herkunft der Formel Una Persona, Philosophia Patrum 8, Leiden: E J Brill, 1986, Journal of Theological Studies ns 41.1 (April), pp.264-266
 
 

Rowan Williams Bibliography, 1980–1985

[For some acknowledgments, and an important note, please see this post. For 1972–1979, and an explanation, go here.]

1980

Articles and Lectures

1980a     ‘The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of V.N. Lossky’ in Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes (ed.) New Studies in Theology 1, London: Duckworth, pp.95-117; reproduced as ‘Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology’ in Wrestling with Angels, pp.1-24

1980b     ‘Wort und Geist’, in Klaus Kremkau (ed.) Religiöse Bewusstsein und der heilige Geist in der Kirche, Beiheft zur Ökumenischen Rundschau 40, Frankfurt: Verlag Otto Lembeck, pp.77-96; English version published as ‘Word and Spirit’ in On Christian Theology, pp.107-127

Other

1980c     ‘D Z Phillips and James Richmond (Letter to the Editors)’, Theology 83 no.693 (May), pp.205-207 (response to James Richmond, ‘”Religion Without Explanation”: Theology and D.Z. Phillips’, Theology 83 no.691 (January), pp.34-43)

1980d     ‘George Florovsky (1893-1979): The Theologian’ [obituary], Sobornost n.s. 2.1, pp.70-72
 
 

1981

Articles and Lectures

1981a     ‘Origen on the Soul of Jesus’, in RPC Hanson and Henri Crouzel (eds) Origeniana Tertia: The Third International Colloquium for Origen Studies (University of Manchester, September 7th – 11th, 1981), Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985, pp.131-137
 
 

1982

Books

1982a     Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, London, Darton, Longman & Todd; American Edition: New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984; Revised Edition: London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2002

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1982b     Eucharistic Sacrifice: The Roots of a Metaphor, Grove Liturgical Study 31, Bramcote, Notts: Grove Books

Articles and Lectures

1982c     ‘Authority and the Bishop in the Church’, in Mark Santer (ed.) Their Lord and Ours: Approaches to Authority, Community, and the Unity of the Church, London: SPCK, pp.90-112
 
 

1983

Books

1983a     The Truce of God, The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book, London: Collins Fount / Faith Press / New York: Pilgrim Press; revised edition Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005 and The Truce of God: Peacemaking in Troubled Times, Norwich: Canterbury, 2005.

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1983b     (ed. with Kenneth Leech) Essays Catholic and Radical: A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150 th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833-1983, London: Bowerdean Press; including (i) ‘Introduction’ (with Kenneth Leech) and (ii) ‘What is Catholic Orthodoxy?’

Articles and Lectures

1983c     ‘Liberation Theology and the Anglican tradition’, paper delivered at the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission at Codrington College, Barbados; see 1984b     

1983d     ‘The Logic of Arianism’, Journal of Theological Studies ns. 34.1 (April), pp.56-81

1983e     ‘The Prophetic and the Mystical: Heiler Revisited’, New Blackfriars 64 (757), pp.330-47

1983f     ‘The Quest of the Historical Thalia’, in Robert C. Gregg (ed.) Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments; Papers from the Ninth International Conference on Patristic Studies, September 5-10, 1983, Oxford, England, Patristic Monographs series 11, Cambridge MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1985, pp.1-35

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

1983f     ‘Ascension of Christ’, ‘Christocentrism’, ‘Freudian psychology’, ‘Imagery, Religious’ and ‘Interiority, Interiorization’ in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds) Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Philadelphia: Westminster / A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, London: SCM

1983g     ‘Deification’, ‘Dark Night, Darkness’, ‘Desert, Desert Fathers’, ‘St. Bernard of Clairvaux’, ‘St. Ignatius of Antioch’ and ‘St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ in Gordon Wakefield (ed.) Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, Philadelphia: Westminster / A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, London: SCM
 
 

1984

Books (booklets and pamphlets)

1984a     with Mark Collier, Beginning Now, Part 1: Peacemaking Theology: A Study Book for Individuals and Groups, London: Dunamis

1984b     (ed. with David Nicholls) in Politics and Theological Identity: Two Anglican Essays, London: The Jubilee Group, 1984, including ‘Preface’ (with David Nicholls) and ‘Liberation Theology and the Anglican tradition’ (see 1983f); pp.5-6, 7-26

Articles and Lectures

1984c     ‘Butler’s Western Mysticism: Towards an Assessment’, Downside Review 102 (July), pp.197-215

1984d     ‘“Religious Realism”: On Not Quite Agreeing with Don Cupitt’, Modern Theology 1.1 (October), pp.3-24; reproduced in Wrestling with Angels, pp.228-254

1984e     ‘A Response’ in Colin Ogilvie Buchanan (ed.) Essays on Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Early Church: A Sequel to Liturgical Study no 31, Grove Liturgical Study 40, Bramcote, Notts: Grove Books, pp.34-7

1984f     ‘Violence and the Gospel in South Africa’, New Blackfriars 65 (774) (December), pp.505-13

1984g     ‘Women and the Ministry: A Case for Theological Seriousness’, in Monica Furlong (ed.) Feminine in the Church, London: SPCK, pp.11-27

Book Reviews

1984h     ‘Leach’s Bible’, review of Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock (eds), Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth, Cambridge: CUP, 1983 in RAIN (Royal Anthropological Institute News) 61 (Apr 1984), pp.11–12

1984i     Review of Eric F. Osborn, The Beginning of Christian Philosophy, Cambridge: CUP, 1981, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (January), pp.145-7
 
 

1985

Articles and Lectures

1985a     ‘The Son’s Knowledge of the Father in Origen’, in Lothar Lies (ed.) Origeniana Quarta: Die Referate des 4. internationalen Origeneskongresses (Innsbruck, 2.-6. September 1985), Innsbrucker theologische Studien, ed E. Coreth, W. Kern, H. Rotter, 19, Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, pp.146-153

Book Reviews

1985b     Review of Gillian R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, Cambridge: CUP, 1982, Religious Studies 21.1 (March), pp.95-97

1985c     Review of Patrick Sherry, Spirit, Saints and Immortality, New York: Macmillan / Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984, Theology 88 (March), pp.151-153
 
 

Rowan Williams Bibliography: 1972-1979

In odd moments recently, I’ve been tidying up my Rowan Williams bibliography (mostly compiled while writing Difficult Gospel), giving it a bit of a polish before releasing it in public. I’ve had quite a few requests for it over the last couple of years, so I assume there’s some demand. I’ve still got a little bit of work to do on some of the more recent material, but I thought I’d start releasing a preliminary version of the earlier years – just in case someone eagle-eyed spots any problems. So, here’s the first in the series: 1972-1979. One quick caveat: I’m afraid that my posting of this bibliography does not mean that I am in a position to provide copies of any of these items.

Please note that this bibliography is still in draft – and that, in particular, the identifiers (e.g., ‘1987b’) are subject to some alteration as new items are added.

For some acknowledgments, and an important note, please see this post.

[Edit: I’ve done some tidying up; hopefully it’s a little easier to read.]

1972

Poetry

1972a     (ed.) The Gemini Poets: Poems in Aid of the Christian Movement for Peace, Cambridge: The Gemini Press; including eight poems by RW: Lazarus (May 1972); Praying 1, 2 & 3 (Jan 1971); Object in a Folk-Museum (Mar 1972); Counterpoint; Mass of Maundy Thursday (Mar 1972); Song for Advent

Articles and Lectures

1972b     ‘The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras’, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.6 (Winter), pp.415-30

Book Reviews

1972c     Review of Paul Evdokimov, La Connaissance de Dieu selon la Tradition Orientale, Lyon: Xavier Mappus, 1967, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.5 (Summer), pp.359-61

1972d     Review of Paul Evdokimov, L’Esprit Saint dans la Tradition Orthodoxe, Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.4 (Winter), pp.284-5
 
 

1973

Articles and Lectures

1973a     ‘Bread in the Wilderness: The Monastic Ideal in Thomas Merton and Paul Evdokimov’ in M. Basil Pennington (ed.) One Yet Two: Monastic Tradition East and West (Papers from an Orthodox-Cistercian Symposium, 1973), Cistercian Studies 29, Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1976, pp.452-473

Book Reviews

1973b     Review of Methodios G Phougias, Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism, Oxford: OUP, n.d., Downside Review 91 (January), pp.75-76
 
 

1974

Articles and Lectures

1974a     ‘The Spirit of the Age to Come’, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.9 (Summer), pp.613-26
 
 

1975

Books

1975a     The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique, University of Oxford doctoral thesis; cf 1980a     
 
 

1976

Books (edited and trasnslated)

1976a     (ed. and tr.) Pierre Pascal, The Religion of the Russian People, London: Mowbrays / Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (translation of Civilisatoin Paysanne en Russe II: La Religion du People Russe); includes ‘Translator’s Foreword’, pp.vii-ix

Articles and Lectures

1976b     ‘Christian Art and Cultural Pluralism: Reflections on “L’art de l’icone”, by Paul Evdokimov’ [on L’Art de l’Icône: Théologie de la Beauté, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1970, Eastern Churches Review 8.1, pp.38-44

1976c     ‘Person and Personality in Christology’, article review of Anthony T. Hanson, Grace and Truth: a Study in the Doctrine of the Incarnation, London: SPCK, 1975, Downside Review 94 (October), pp.253-260

1976d     ‘Three Styles of Monastic Reform’ in Benedicta Ward (ed.) The Influence of Saint Bernard: Anglican Essays, Fairacres Publications 66, Oxford: SLG Press, pp.23-40

Sermons and Speeches

1976e     ‘To Give and not to Count the Cost: A Sermon Preached at Mirfield in February 1976’, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 7.5 (Summer 1977), pp.401-3

Book Reviews

1976f     Review of Ray Sherman Anderson, Historical Transcendence and the Reality of God: A Christological Critique, London: Geoffrey Chapman / Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975, Downside Review 94 (July), pp.236-239

1976g     Review of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God, tr. John Halliburton, London: SPCK, 1975, Downside Review 94 (April), pp.153-154

1976h     Review of Alain Riou, Le Monde et l’Eglise selon Maxime le Confesseur, Théologie Historique 22, Paris: Beauchesne, 1973, Eastern Churches Review 8.1, pp.92-93

1976i     Review of Benedicta Ward, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, Fairacres Publications 48, Oxford: SLG Press, 1975, and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (The Alphabetical Collection), London: Mowbrays, 1975, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 7.3 (Summer), pp.219-20
 
 

1977

Articles and Lectures

1977a     ‘Eric Gill’, Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 7.4 (Winter-Spring), pp.261-9

1977b     ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’, Eastern Churches Review 9.1-2, pp.27-44

1977c     ‘Poetic and Religious Imagination’, Theology 80 (May), pp.178-187

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

1997d     ‘Christmas as a Christian Festival’, letter to The Times, Dec 3, p.15
 
 

1978

Articles and Lectures

1978a     ‘A Person that Nobody Knows: A Paradoxical Tribute to Thomas Merton’, Cistercian studies 13.4, pp.399-401; reprinted in the Advent 2002 issue of The Merton Journal
 
 

1979

Books

1979a      The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St John of the Cross, London: Darton, Longman & Todd; American edition: Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St John of the Cross, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1980; re-issued as The Wound of Knowledge: A Ttheological History from the New Testament to Luther and St John of the Cross, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 1998; revised edition: The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St John of the Cross, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990; Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Pubns. 1991

Articles and Lectures

1979b     ‘Barth on the Triune God’ in S.W. Sykes (ed.) Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method, Oxford: Clarendon; reproduced in Wrestling with Angels, pp.106-149

1979c     ‘Mankind, Nation, State’ in Paul Ballard and Huw Jones (eds), This Land and People (Y Wlad A’r Bobl Hyn): A Symposium on Christian and Welsh National Identity, Cardiff: Collegiate Centre of Theology, University College, pp.119-125

Book Reviews

1979d     Review of John Meyendorff, Living Tradition: Orthodox Witness in the Contemporary World, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978, Sobornost n.s. 1.2 (Autumn), pp.87-8
 
 

Acceptance of media law by British legal system is ‘inevitable’…

I liked this. (Hat tip: Clare Bryden.)

Williams and Sharia: Coda

I’m not planning on writing any more about Rowan Williams – at least, not any time soon. But I did want to point to a few other good discussions of the episode available elsewhere on the web.

What is Enlightenment? More on Williams and Sharia

The account I have already given of Williams’ speech on Civil and Religious Law in England was, despite it’s neuron-numbing length, seriously incomplete. Facing one set of Williams’ critics, I concentrated on demonstrating that Williams had not ridden roughshod over everything that secularists and advocates of universal human rights hold dear. I described his lectures as a ‘serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’. I stand by that – but it does need to be put in context.

I can best approach that context by quoting famous words written by one of Rowan Williams’ friends:

Once, there was no ‘secular’. And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human’, when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed…. The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and practice. – John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Theology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1990]), 9.

Williams shares something of the same understanding: that the ideas and practices that underpin the ‘secular’ – the ideas and practices from which we have woven a state capable of hosting multiple religious communities, and of subjecting all of them to a common framework of rights – were not miraculously chiselled on granite tablets and dropped onto the toes of a passing republican or philosophe at the start of the eighteenth century. Those ideas and practices have a history.

Like Milbank, Williams does not think that history is a story of the inevitable emergence of secularity, waiting only upon the crumbling of the sacred, as if secularity is the natural state of humankind. Rather, the history of secularity’s emergence is contingent: one can ask, Where did this come from? Why here? Why now? And, like Milbank, Williams thinks that the story one needs to tell in order to understand this contingent emergence is a thoroughly religious, theological story. The Enlightenment may emerge as a rejection of all sorts of aspects of fractious Christianity – but it is a rejection that was enacted by hands holding weapons pulled from Christian trees. (If you want a philosophically robust account of the kind of dynamics involved in this process, I’d recommend Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture.)

As Williams puts it, the invention of secularity required (amongst other things)

a certain valuation of the human as such and a conviction that the human subject is always endowed with some degree of freedom over against any and every actual system of human social life; both of these things are historically rooted in Christian theology, even when they have acquired a life of their own in isolation from that theology. It never does any harm to be reminded that without certain themes consistently and strongly emphasised by the ‘Abrahamic’ faiths, themes to do with the unconditional possibility for every human subject to live in conscious relation with God and in free and constructive collaboration with others, there is no guarantee that a ‘universalist’ account of human dignity would ever have seemed plausible or even emerged with clarity. Slave societies and assumptions about innate racial superiority are as widespread a feature as any in human history (and they have persistently infected even Abrahamic communities, which is perhaps why the Enlightenment was a necessary wake-up call to religion…).

Why does this matter? Because if it is true, then any picture of a straightforward opposition between religion and the secular is a drastic oversimplification. And that means that any cry that simply says, ‘You can’t do this religious stuff; we’re secular!’ is talking as much nonsense as the cry that says, ‘You can’t do this secular stuff; we’re a Christian nation!’

To understand the history of secularity’s emergence, Williams thinks, is to see the sheer ungrounded assertion involved any simple story which sees ‘unqualified secular monopoly’ as the natural end-point of the Enlightenment, the only consistent interpretation and application of ‘Enlightenment’ principles. (And that goes for all those who tell this story with boos, as well as those who tell it with cheers.) That story-line is not built in to the very idea of the secular; far from it. And so Williams can say that to defend

an unqualified secular legal monopoly in terms of the need for a universalist doctrine of human right or dignity is to misunderstand the circumstances in which that doctrine emerged, and [to understand] that the essential liberating (and religiously informed) vision it represents is not imperilled by a loosening of the monopolistic framework.

(That sentence needs reading carefully: Williams is not denying the need for a ‘universalist doctrine of human right or dignity’, but rather denying that such a doctrine is secular-and-so-inherently-opposed-to-religion, and so denying that a militant defence of such a doctrine is at the same time a defence of ‘unqualified secular monopoly’.)

Further

what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety.

The narrative that Williams is offering as an alternative to the simplistic secularity-versus-religion narrative can, if taken seriously, enable one to name a form of oppression that would otherwise slip through our conceptual nets: the oppression of a sterile positivism which denies all possibility of – at very least – conscientious objection.

Let me explain that last comment a bit further. In the famous radio interview, Williams said:

a lot of what’s written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there’s one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that. An approach to law which simply said: “There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said.” I think that’s a bit of a danger.

I read several comments in the aftermath saying something like, ‘That there is one law for everybody, and that that is all there is to be said, is and should continue to be the essence of our legal system’. But the language of ‘conscientious objection’ (that Williams uses in that article) points us to at least one example that is not so easy to ridicule. Suppose conscription were introduced again in some future state of war. Should that law make any provision for conscientious objection by pacifists of various kinds (including, but not limited to, religious groups like Quakers)? That is, should the law allow certain kinds of exception, based on the ‘consciences’ of the people in question? Or should it simply say, ‘No, there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said. Pick up your gun, soldier!’?

However, the point I want to focus on here is that at the heart of Williams’ strategy for advocating this as a valid interpretation and fulfilment of what is best in the Enlightenment project is an interpretation of the emergence of that Enlightenment – an interpretation that sees that it is made possible by certain crucial theological developments. Indeed, Williams is going further: he thinks that what is properly central to the Enlightenment, properly at the heart of secularity, is an ‘Abrahamic’ insight: ‘a commitment to human dignity as such‘. And so Williams is a defender of this core of the Enlightenment heritage because he is a Christian, and he is advocating ‘interactive pluralism’ as an interpretation of the Enlightenment heritage because in defending these aspects of the Enlightenment heritage he is doing his job: he is asking how the implications of the Christian Gospel can be worked out in the world. Far from proposing a solution that ignores the Christian heritage of this country, he is taking that heritage far more seriously than those who think it sets up some kind of magic magnetism that repels any negotiation with, or recognition of, Muslim consciences.

(Just as an aside, it’s worth noticing an interesting symmetry in Williams’ argument. It is only by understanding the emergence of ‘Enlightenment values’ – the tradition of theological and moral inquiry from which they emerge – that one can understand what are appropriate and inappropriate ways of defending them. It is only by telling the story so far that one can make judgments about what is central and what is peripheral, and so know how to go on in difficult circumstances. And just so with sharia: Williams suggests that it is only by a nuanced understanding of the contexts of sharia’s emergence and deployment that one can make appropriate judgments about what is central to it and what peripheral, and so know how to defend it in difficult circumstances.)

Of course Williams does not think that only Christians (or Jews or Muslims) can be truly committed to the Enlightenment project. Of course he does not think that no one else really cares about human dignity as such. Of course he does not think that Christianity (or Islam or Judaism) has a great record when it comes to the actual upholding of this idea. Nevertheless, he believes it is an idea that grew in theological soil – and so an idea that might still stand to be illuminated by theological exploration.

Of course, this particular lecture (not delivered to a particularly theologically aware audience) leaves the details of Williams theological case rather sketchy. I’m looking forward to finding out more, because it seems to me that there’s an interesting distance between Williams and Milbank emerging: on the face of it, Williams seems to be advocating a more positive account of the theological roots (and routes) of the Enlightenment, and of liberalism, than I’ve seen from Milbank (and yet doing it in terms which at heart are not obviously inimical to Radical Orthodoxy). The most pregnant hint in the lecture is Williams’ comment about ‘universal law and universal right’ being ‘a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject’ – i.e., a way of recognising the ways in which human beings exceed any of the particular contexts in which their identities are formed. (I’m reminded of Susannah Ticciati’s Job and the Disruption of Identity, which would, I think, say that this is the realm of the ‘for naught’ and ‘for God’s sake’ of human identity.) As Williams says,

theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that.

Me neither.

Williams and strategy

We have a problem. We have a nation whose dealings with religion in general, and Islam in particular, are befuddled by dangerous myths and clumsy confusions. And there’s nothing cosily benign about that stupidity: there are walls built from it that nearly divide our society into ghettos.

We could, if we wanted, try to fight fire with fire: replace one set of lazy misapprehensions with another – trade slogan for slogan until we’re all bloodied from being beaten with placards. Heaven knows we’ve done this often enough, and will do it again soon enough.

Rowan Williams’ lecture was a risky attempt at a different kind of strategy. He tried to speak carefully and precisely about an electrically controversial issue, in the hope of getting some real conversation about it going.

We all know what happened next.

It worked.

Yes, there was a storm of angry protest, the scale of which was quite overwhelming. But there’s no way of getting public conversation about this going except by speaking in public – in a public that is largely unready for such a conversation. So that was inevitable and unavoidable, even if few would have predicted quite how intense it became.

But look again. Read the Weekend’s broadsheets. Listen to the news today. Look at online discussions. For every yard of vitriolic, dim-witted abuse, there’s an inch of serious comment on the issues Williams raised. Some of it is in varying degrees disagreement with the Archbishop, some in varying degrees of agreement. But quite a lot of it is intelligent, quite a lot well-informed. Given ten seconds of searching across the media from the last four days, you’ll find any number explanations of the role that sharia plays in our legal system already; you’ll find any number of discussions of the place of religious communities in a secular state; you’ll find any number of discussions of religious law and human rights.

Job done.

Of course, things are never quite that simple. There are, of course, some qualifications and further questions that we need to discuss.

(1) Has the reaction to Williams’ speech also stoked Islamophobia (rather than bringing to public expression already existing Islamophobia)? That’s a very difficult question to answer, I think. But can you think of another way of getting the serious public debate about these issues going that doesn’t risk pushing that button? Try imagine what would have happened if it had not been the Archbishop of Canterbury, but a coalition of prominent, moderate Muslims who had tried to get the debate going. Would that have gone more smoothly?

(2) Has the reaction to Williams’ speech damaged relationships in the Anglican communion at a sensitive time? Maybe – though, again, I have my doubts about whether it will have cooled relationships that weren’t already pretty cool. But in any case, can you foresee a time, any time soon, when the Anglican Communion is going to be in such a state of robust bonhomie that a debate like this would run smoothly? And might one be forgiven for thinking that the relationship of large Western democracies to Islam is quite an urgent and important issue – perhaps even as important as what the Anglican Communion does about sexuality?

(3) Has the reaction to his words done damage to Williams’ own reputation? Quite probably. But, quite frankly, who cares? He is not (or at least should not be) in the PR business. He has no business trying to preserve his own reputation for its own sake. Yes, ask the other questions – about damage to the welfare of British Muslims, about damage to the Anglican Communion – but getting vilified is, on its own, not in Christian terms any kind of mark of failure.

Only time will tell, of course, whether the Archbishop’s gamble has actually paid off – and even then, we’ll never really know how the ripples that spread from his speech have affected the way things have gone. But please forgive me if, on current evidence, I don’t join the chorus of those who think his speech and interview were obviously unwise, or obviously naive, or obviously misguided, or obviously insensitive. Yes, it could probably have been clearer – but not by much; he’s challenged everyone who is listening to raise their game, and you don’t do that by spouting easily grasped platitudes.

An additional note on easy narratives

Should any tired journalist visit this page, and wish for some ideas for ready copy, can I suggest two simple narratives that will make your job easier? Neither of them is true, of course, but each can be made superficially plausible.

The first is the story that the Archbishop is a head-in-the-clouds academic, with no real grounding in the real world – and that this lecture is the latest in a series of blunders that could only be made by someone almost terminally naive. Accompany this by pictures that emphasise his eyebrows, and you have the makings of a convincing article. If you’re careful, you can make it sound like he’s been stuck in some academic cloister all his life, and has only emerged blinking into public in the last five minutes. You’ll have to brush over the fact that he’s exercised rather a lot of pastoral ministry, responding to quite an impressive range of quite-real-enough-thank-you circumstances, and you’ll also do best not to mention how long he’s spent handling eye-watering arguments across the Anglican Communion that involve some of the most fractious and wilful antagonists you could hope to find – but just use the words ‘ivory tower’ a couple of times and your job will be done.

The second, rather similar, is the story that the Archbishop naively assumes the world to be stocked with ‘people of good will’ who will be reasonable if we speak to them nicely – and that he’s rather charmingly surprised when people turn out to be quite as wilfully unpleasant and selfish as they normally are. You’ll have to hide the fact that few contemporary theologians have as dark a view as he does of human beings’ ability destructively to deceive themselves – but people are always prepared to swallow a ‘genial vicar’ stereotype, so you should get away with it.

Rowan Williams and Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed

Rowan Williams and Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed

The stir surrounding Rowan Williams’ recent lecture on ‘Civil and Religious Law in England‘ has been quite incredible – not least for the depth of misrepresentation that has shaped so many of the responses. I doubt there’s anything much I can do to change that, but just in case there’s anyone still listening I’d like to offer four things:

One quick comment before I begin, prompted by a couple of e-mails I’ve had in the last few days. I’m not any kind of official spokesman for the Archbishop. Although I have written one book on him, and edited a book of his essays, we’ve met (I think) only three times, and not at all since 2003, and the last contact I had with him was a brief exchange of e-mails after the publication of Wrestling with Angels. What follows is simply my take on what Williams said, based entirely on what I know of his public statements. So apologies to anyone looking for behind the scenes insights – you won’t find them here.

A brief summary

Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’.

That is, he balances on the one hand a defence of one of the key achievements of the Enlightenment, freedom of religion, with on the other hand a strong call for public accountability in the ways that religions contribute to our public life. And my judgment is that it is the latter that is the stronger note in what he says.

If you don’t believe me, read the more detailed analysis below. I think you’ll see what I mean.

A slightly longer summary

Rowan Williams takes it for granted that we live in a largely secular, liberal, pluralist state. And his question is about the place that religion appropriately has in such a state.

One of the strands of his lecture is to ask how a society like ours can properly uphold the right to freedom of religion (though that’s not quite the terminology he uses).

He assumes that ‘freedom of religion’ isn’t just a case of freedom of opinion, or freedom of speech, or freedom of association – not because religions deserve some extra aura of special ‘respect’, but because none of those freedoms quite captures what religions actually are. To be free to practice a religion is to be free to be involved in a complex, social, ongoing context – a ‘tradition’ or ‘community’ to use some shorthand – that deeply forms ones identity. If freedom of religion is to mean anything at all, it must mean freedom to be formed by such a community, and freedom to participate as a citizen in public life as one who has been formed by such a community.

As the furore has made very clear, Williams uses the example of sharia, which he explains as one of the key practices that enable Islamic communities to work as complex, social, ongoing contexts in which Muslim identities are formed. If we are serious about freedom of religion in a liberal, pluralist state, we need to do some serious thinking about the right of Islamic people to be formed by sharia, and to participate in public life as people formed by sharia. And because sharia governs some aspects of Islamic life that are touched on by our legal system, that means that we can’t avoid asking about whether and how our legal system can recognise some of the decisions that are made, or processes that are carried out, in Islamic communities by means of sharia.

However, Williams places at least as strong an emphasis on the limits that religious freedom must have in a liberal, pluralist state. He argues quite directly, for instance, that this freedom can’t be allowed to deny to anyone the rights that we in our society regard as universal. It can’t be allowed to curtail anyone’s full citizenship. And he is in the lecture completely uncompromising about that, and spends a good deal of his lecture asking what conditions would have to be met if our society were to move towards any kind of greater legal recognition of the role of sharia of the kind mentioned. He suggests that there are areas where such recognition might nevertheless be possible: ‘aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution’ – and in some of these areas there is already a recognition of sharia in British law. Nevertheless, he does not mince his words about the difficulties that will be involved in handling this question appropriately and sensitively.

The thrust of this second strand of Williams’ lecture is, however, both more positive and more radical than that might suggest. He argues that the pursuit of this kind of greater recognition of sharia – and, in general, the public recognition of religious communities of which this is a key example – is not simply a matter of trying to do something for the Islamic (or Christian, or Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist…) community. On the one hand, he thinks it has something to offer to the public conversations by which our society deliberates about ‘the common good’ – though that does not come in for much analysis in this lecture. On the other hand, however, he thinks that such a process has something to offer a society threatened with various forms of fragmentation. By drawing the exercise of sharia into the ambit of the British legal system, you bring it into a system of accountability and public discourse. You move it out of a ‘private’ context where forms of public scrutiny are very limited and very blunt, and move it into the public world of question and answer, explanation and reason-giving, criticism and response – of conversations that extend across the boundaries of the religious community, binding that religious community more firmly to genuinely public life.

And it is that, I suggest, which is the central (and quite characteristic) thrust of Williams lecture: a call for what he calls ‘interactive pluralism’: a call for public accountability, public discourse, public explanation, public scrutiny. To protect the freedom of religious voices to contribute to the conversations that constitute our common life is to bind them to such accountability.

A detailed analysis of the lecture

The Archbishop’s lecture has a very practical starting point. He points to ‘the presence of communities which, while no less “law-abiding” than the rest of the population, relate to something other than the British legal system alone.’ That word ‘alone’ at the end of the sentence is important. There are religious groups in Britain who as well as being governed by ordinary British law, operate some kind of strongly entrenched internal ‘legal’ system of their own in addition – and at least some of the members of those groups regard the decisions of their religious legal system as binding.

The question that Williams thinks we can’t avoid asking is: Should the decisions made by those internal religious legal systems ever be given any kind of recognition by British law? (And, of course, he knows that in some specific contexts, that question has already been answered “Yes” by the British legal system.)

He also poses this question a second way: Should the British legal system ever delegate any of its powers to these religious legal systems?

He says there are two kinds of things we need to think about if we’re going to answer these questions – roughly speaking, practical issues and theoretical issues. The practical issues are about whether and how recognition could actually work. The theoretical issues are about whether we should want it to work – and those are issues which will turn out to require some pretty deep reflection on the nature of our legal system. Right up front, he tells us he’s going to be asking whether any kind of recognition or delegation of religious law is appropriate in a ‘largely secular social environment’.

He turns to Islam and sharia as his prime example – and notes just how emotive this example is. The idea that some Muslims want ‘the freedom to live under sharia law’ is an explosive one, surrounded by both real anxieties and sensationalist reporting. Sharia is widely understood to mean brutal punishments, forced marriages and so on; it is widely seen as ‘a pre-modern system in which human rights have no role’.

What is sharia?

Williams explains that sharia is not the name of a single, agreed set of codified laws – some sort of Islamic Ten Commandments or Book of Leviticus, perhaps. For one thing, there are several rival versions of sharia. For another, sharia refers more properly to a legal process: it refers to a process that works from a set of principles to come up with particular legal judgments.

The principles involved are, of course, to do with core Islamic beliefs about the nature of God and of the world – beliefs that on the one hand are specific to this particular religious community, but which on the other hand have to do with how that community sees everything: they are this particular community’s universal principles. But those principles are not a detailed set of guidelines that tell you what is legal and what is not legal in every circumstance (even if they do contain some such specifics).

It is only through an ongoing process of reflecting on and debating and applying those principles that particular legal judgments are made. Sharia is something you do.

Williams is aware that there are all sorts of questions within Islam about who is authorized to be a proper interpreter of sharia, and about what kind of latitude for interpretation those interpreters have. He briefly sketches the difference between traditionalist interpreters (who put a good deal of weight on faithfulness to the accumulated details of classical traditions of sharia) and others (who think that faithfulness to the underlying principles of sharia allows quite a lot of freedom of interpretation over detailed application). That is a debate internal to Islam – but there is little doubt from Williams’ lecture that he thinks the latter forms of sharia are going to be easier to work with in the context of the British legal system.

Sharia and the common good

Williams next talks at some length about the voluntary nature of submission to sharia, even in many states governed by sharia. He states that sharia assumes ‘the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the umma‘ (the community governed by sharia).

That is, you can, in principle, be a member of a ‘Muslim nation’, and not be a member of the umma. There’s a difference in those states between citizenship and being a (sharia-governed) Muslim. So a non-Muslim in such a state can still be a citizen. And a Muslim citizen in such a state is also a co-citizen of those non-Muslims: so even for the Muslim, being a Muslim (a member of the community of Muslims) and being a citizen (a member of the community of the State) are two slightly different things. In those states, ‘the Muslim … has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.’

Williams knows, of course, that this is not the universal picture in the Islamic world (as some other parts of the Anglican Communion have told him from their direct experience), but he claims ‘that the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise [this kind of picture] as consistent with Muslim integrity.’

Why has Williams laboured this? Because his argument works as a pincer movement. He wants to show, as it were, that it makes sense in Islamic terms to think of sharia relating to a more general legal system – such as the law of a nation state like Britain. And then he is going to show that it makes sense to think of the British legal system relating to sharia.

Identity and belonging

But Williams has discussed sharia in this way for another reason: it has enabled him to introduce a big philosophical theme. The case of the Muslim who is also a citizen is one example of a more general point: ‘our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging‘. I am a British citizen, a Christian, more specifically a member of the Church of England, a member of a particular family, a member of the community of academic theologians, a member of the University of Exeter… and so on. My social identity is at least in part defined by all of those ‘sets of relations’ or ‘modes of belonging’.

How do these different ‘sets of relations’ relate to one another? How does being a Christian relate to being a citizen? How does being a member of a particular university relate to being a member of a particular discipline? Being people whose identities are defined in these complex ways raises all sorts of questions. Williams will argue that we can’t avoid these sorts of questions – questions about our the relationships between different aspects of our social identities – and that they are very closely related to his main questions about legal systems.

Actually, it’s too bland to say that this complexity raises questions. It can create real problems. Williams identifies two.

Religion against citizenship?

For instance, I might say, “I am a Christian, and I see that particular self-definition ‘as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality.’ In some ways (it’s actually quite complicated to tease this out properly), for me to say, ‘I am a Christian’ is (by my lights) to say the deepest thing about who I am.”

That in itself might be fine. Other people might not agree, of course, but my saying this does not, in and of itself, create a problem. But it would create a problem if I said, “I am a Christian, and so not really a British citizen; not really a member of this family…” and so on. That is, there would be a problem if I regarded the obligations placed upon me by my acceptance that “I am a Christian” as making irrelevant the obligations placed upon me by being a citizen, a Father, an academic, or whatever – and saw kowtowing to those ‘other kinds of socio-political arrangement’ as ‘a kind of betrayal’.

(Just in case the implication is not obvious, let me spell this out: Williams is here siding against those who think that being a Muslim should somehow trump being British, or exempt someone from the obligations of citizenship, or free him or her from the strictures of British law. We have a real problem if religion is seen by its adherents as any kind of ‘Get out of jail free’ card.)

Citizenship against religion?

But there’s another possible problem, as well – one that works the other way round. There is also a problem – in Williams’ words – ‘when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity’

What would that look like?

Williams spells it out. We have this problem if secular government says “You are a citizen, bound by the obligations and opportunities afforded by this state’s secular law – and any other way you define yourself can only be your own private and individual choice. Those private and individual choices have no bearing on your life as a citizen – unless of course they lead you to infringe the law in some way.” (That’s my paraphrase, by the way, not his.)

As Williams says, such a claim is ‘not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion’, so his belief that it is a real problem is going to require some unpacking. This is where the argument begins to get rather involved. You’ll find part of his argument here, and another part later on, when he comes to the ‘third objection’ to what he is proposing.

The meaning of actions

This morning, I walked downstairs to find my two-year-old son crying. He made it clear that my four-year-old daughter had hit him with a book. On questioning, she explained that they had been sitting beside one another, and that she had simply caught her brother accidentally when she opened the book. I thought she was telling the truth: and so I realised I was faced with a clumsy rather than with a violent child. That, of course, made a difference to how I reacted. Had I gone on to treat her as if she had deliberately hit her brother, I would have been being unjust.

The crucial thing in that episode was that I did not simply make a judgment about her physical behaviour (she had moved the book in such a way that it made contact with her brother) but also made judgments about her intention – and that meant making judgments about the meaning that her action had for her.

Now, attending to the meaning that actions have for their agents is obviously a very important part of our legal system. But Williams contends that this sometimes breaks down. ‘There is a risk’ he says, following Maleiha Malik, ‘of assuming that “mainstreram” jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents’. How so? Well, that jurisprudence might bypass the meanings actions have for their agents ‘in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in’.

Suppose I am part of a religious grouping that has, ever since the excruciating death in 1276 of the minor prophet Bob the Wise, let off fire-crackers at 4am on the morning of the 2nd February every year. And suppose I find myself in court, faced with a charge of – well, being really annoying at 4am. A just court should, presumably, take account of the difference between my case and that of the lad from next door who let of firecrackers at 4am on the previous morning because he felt wanted to disturb the peace of his hated parents. That is not to say that they’ll punish him and let me off – as if my religious sensitivities should somehow preserve me from prosecution or punishment. But in passing judgment, setting penalties, proposing remedies and so on, it makes sense for the court to know what they’re dealing with. The court will be missing something if they simply say, as I try to explain about Bob the Wise, and about the generations of my fire-cracking forebears, ‘Forget all that, Dr. Higton: the fact remains – and it is the only fact that this court cares about – that you set of the firecracker at that unearthly hour. Did you or did you not do so?’ (That’s what Williams means when quotes Malik talking about taking ‘the basic action’ as the unit of assessment, rather than ‘the history of the individual or the origins of the social practice which provides the context within which the act is performed’.) This would be me and the court talking past one another: it would not hear what I was saying as pertinent to the case; I would not hear its condemnation as appropriately describing what I had done – and so would not be able to accept the justice of its condemnation.

Once again, and just to be clear: this does not mean I should be let off, just because I have a religious rationale for what I do. It does mean that it behooves the court to listen to my description of what I do, so that it can react appropriately – and so that it doesn’t simply assume that my action is an example of antisocial behaviour and nothing else.

State recognition

Now, Williams’ point is not really (I think) about what happens once someone has apparently broken the law and has appeared before the courts. That’s a useful illustration, but it doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter. Williams’ point is rather broader.

When we as a state are sorting out how things should run – when we are framing laws, when we are deliberating about how laws should actually be put into effect, when we are thinking about exceptional and borderline cases, when we are designing systems and procedures – we should do so in a way that takes account of the plurality of voices and identities that our state includes. That’s what it means to be a liberal, pluralist state. Our role as a state is not to impose a single, uniform meaning on everyone’s actions – it is to listen, to negotiate, to find constructive ways of doing justice to and for the very different people who make up the state: people whose identities are complex in the way Williams has described.

So, in Williams’ view, it is proper that the State recognise that I am a Christian, and that the Christian church is one of my defining communities – and it should recognize that this fact does make some public difference.

Williams argues, in effect, that we as a State should – where it is consistent with out other stately duties – protect my right to be a Christian – and so my right to be a member of this other, Christian community. And that means the state should protect my right – within appropriate limits – to fulfil my religious duties as a member of that Christian community. Fundamentally, we as a state should – within appropriate limits – protect my right to live in the state, and contribute to the state, as the Christian that I am: to speak in public in my own right.

Williams doesn’t think this is special pleading on behalf of religious groups, by the way. He thinks this is part of what it means to be a pluralist liberal democracy.

Where has this got us?

Look where this has got us, though. Williams has sketched an argument (one that he has developed more fully elsewhere) about the state’s duty – within appropriate limits – to protect a Muslim’s right to be a Muslim, to protect his or her right to fulfill his or her religious duties as a member of the Muslim community, and to protect his or her right to live in the state, and contribute to the state, as the Muslim that he or she is: to speak in public in his or her own right.

But if the Muslim’s identity as Muslim is as a member of the umma – as a member of the community governed by sharia, then the state is involved – within appropriate limits – in protecting the Muslim’s right to live under sharia, and to speak in public in a sharia-accented voice. And it is so committed because it is a liberal democracy, not despite being a liberal democracy.

And that means that as a liberal democracy with a Muslim population, we cannot avoid asking how such recognition can work, and – more importantly, what the appropriate limits to it are. Where do we have good reason to draw the line?

To put it a little crudely, imagine the following extreme. At one extreme (a long, long, long way beyond anything Williams proposes or even hints at) you would find the position where the state is so focused on the right of the Muslim community to live under sharia that it says: Go ahead, organize yourselves as a separate jurisdiction, governed entirely by sharia. At the other extreme you would find the position where the state says, ‘We don’t want to know anything about it; what you get up to in the privacy of your own community is your business – as long as it in no way conflicts with or impinges upon the rules and running of the state.’

Williams thinks that the question that faces us as a pluralist liberal state is, How far can we move away from the statist end of this spectrum toward the sharia end of this spectrum, without giving up on other things that are essential to our life as a pluralist liberal state? How far can we go along that spectrum without breaking something important about our society? Once we have identified how far we can go, we should go that far – precisely because we are a pluralist liberal state, and such a state should (for the reasons he’s given) protect insofar as it can a Muslim’s right to live under sharia.

But…

Williams draws attention to three issues which we will need to examine if we’re going to answer the question he has posed. They are all pretty important issues, but the second pushes deeper than the first, and the third pushes deeper still. By the time we reach that third issue, we’re getting in to some really interesting questions about what it means to be a pluralist, liberal state, largely secular, and deeply shaped by the Enlightenment. But we have some other territory to traverse first.

First, he’s going to deal with vexatious appeals to religious scruple. (‘Oh, no, I can’t be expected to pay for my television license; it’s against my religion. See, here, in the Holy Book of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, verse 27!’)

Second, he’s going to deal with the idea that protecting a religious community’s right to organize its own affairs might end up protecting its right to be oppressive in all sorts of ways – particularly to women.

Third, he’s going to deal with the insistence that, well, the law is the law: everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so someone’s membership of a particular religious community really should not make any difference.

Vexatious appeals

We have been talking about the need for public legal processes to take any account of the ways in which some people’s choices or activities are bound up with the firmly-rooted religious identity of a community. If that is to happen, then there will need to be some way in which those public legal processes can differentiate between something that is really bound up with the firmly-rooted religious identity of a community, and something that is not.

Note that saying this does not amount to saying that anything that is really bound up with the firmly-rooted communal religious identity is thereby okay. We’re not talking about any kind of ‘Get out of jail free’ card, remember (or, as Williams puts it, ‘There can be no blank cheques given to unexamined scruples’). Nevertheless, if we as a state are going to take seriously our duty to preserve religious freedom within appropriate limits, we are going to have to know when we’re dealing with a real matter of religious freedom.

So, Williams says, in order to do our job well as a liberal, pluralist state, we’re going to have to make some stab at making important distinctions. What matters really cut to the heart of the religious formation of a community, and what matters can be changed without undercutting something fundamental? He knows that asking that kind of question is pretty fearsomely difficult (even a passing acquaintance with Christian versions of this kind of debate is enough to show that). Nevertheless, he makes the rather obvious point that asking the question seriously is going to be a necessity for any state that wants to (a) take religious freedom seriously, and (b) not be stupid about it.

The form that Williams suggests that ‘asking the question seriously’ must take is interesting. On the one hand, he recognizes that this is a matter that requires some kind of voice that can speak authoritatively from within the religious community. On the other hand, he recognizes that this is a matter of public accountability: a matter of a voice from within the religious community that speaks to a wider public audience, explaining as transparently as possible how the deliberations and decisions of that community work.

Williams knows this is asking a lot. There’s no hint in his lecture that he thinks this would be anything other than a difficult and controversial task. He says, though, that in the case of Islam it might look like the ‘Islamic Shari’a Council’ – but ‘a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body’ with ‘a high degree of community recognition’. A tall order, certainly – but to write off the possibility of any such solution is to write off the possibility of our liberal, pluralist state taking religious freedom seriously without being led up any number of garden paths.

Oppression

The second objection – which Williams calls ‘a very serious one’ is that any move in the direction he is pointing might lead to ‘reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women.’ It could end up ‘actually depriv[ing] members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens’. This is, Williams insists, not on. It might be fine for a religious community to find different ways of exercising the same rights as everyone else; it might be fine for them to have the freedom preserved to order their lives in ways that differ from the rest of society – but not if that leads to the upholding the undermining of those rights that the wider society regards as universal.

So, Williams comes up with a second, vital condition for any move in the direction he is pointing. If a secular, liberal society is concerned to protect the Muslim’s right to live under sharia, it can only do so with a strict limitation: it must not be allowed to work in such a way as to ‘deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.’

Yes, this is another area where Williams is under no illusion that what he proposes is easy. He understands that the kind of deliberation and responsibility that it would require of the practitioners of sharia would be ‘wholly unacceptable’ to some strands of Islamic thought, even though there are other strands which would be wholly open to this possibility. Nevertheless, if we are to move (as Williams has been arguing we must) in the direction of a more mature recognition of religious freedom, we can’t avoid taking this condition seriously.

After all, if being a citizen should not stop one being religious, being religious should certainly not stop one being a citizen.

Two quick points before we move on. First, as we will see a bit later, there is a very important point buried here. Williams sees a move in the direction that he is indicating – to a recognition of sharia in some circumstances, with this caveat – as a way of bring the operation of sharia in Britain into a realm where it is made more fully and directly accountable and transparent to public scrutiny. Williams thinks that a move in this direction has the capacity, if it can be made to work at all, of working against oppression. To put it crudely: He thinks it is far better that sharia be administered in public than in private.

Second, this way of talking about the fact that citizenship can’t be diluted for anyone, whatever other communities he or she is a member of, shows that Williams is not talking about sharia, or any other religious law, being given ‘a sort of local monopoly in some areas’. To adopt that kind of model would be to abandon all that Williams presents as most important about the path he is marking out.

The universal rule of law

The third objection that Williams examines is the most far-ranging – but also the most abstract. It’s the hardest bit of the lecture to get hold of, but also in many ways the most important – and it explains why he cares about this question in the first place.

The third objection is the one that says: surely we must have one law for everyone; surely the very idea of any kind of ‘supplementary jurisdiction’, any kind of alternative set of legal procedures or possibilities for one group of people, is incurably divisive? Surely Williams’ suggestion is a betrayal of one of the most important things about out society: that it has, at least in principle, a legal system that shows no favours, that treats all people whatsoever equally as citizens? After all, as Williams puts it: ‘the law is the law; … everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms’.

That vision of the universality of law has deep roots in the Enlightenment, a period of great protest ‘against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number’. This protest, Williams says, was ‘entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe’. And Williams says a big yes to what he takes to be the fundamental point: ‘equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process’.

But, says Williams, while that is vital (and, yes, he really does mean that), and while it should in no way be curtailed or damaged, it is not in itself enough for a fully-functioning, healthy society. He sees it, as it were, as quite rightly setting an essential outline for social life – but by itself it is no help in colouring in those outlines, to produce an actual, living society.

The actual shape of people’s lives (their ‘social identity and personal motivation’) is shaped by other kinds of involvement, other kinds of affiliation, other kinds of community. People are not just citizens.

That’s not something he simply wishes were true – it is, he thinks, a (rather obvious) fact about the actual society that we live in. It is simply not the case that we have a society made up of a large set of private citizens, whose social dispositions and habits are the result of purely private preferences. (If you try to describe society that way, you’ll end up with accounts that simply aren’t capable of doing justice to what really goes on – just as if you tried to give an account of, say, traffic patterns in London by thinking about a large collection of individual drivers free to travel wherever and whenever they like, without paying attention to the impact on traffic broad social patterns that shape where and when different groups of people work.)

Rather we have a society which is in significant part made up of people whose social dispositions and habits are formed by a variety of communities and traditions – by a whole variety of messily interlocking social contexts that form their identities. Religions loom large amongst such contexts, but they’re not the only ones: it is also possible to identify other communities or traditions of ‘custom and habit’ that have the same effect.

Remember, the fact that people are involved in these communities or traditions does not mean that they are any less than citizens. Williams has been insisting on that point consistently, and we’re going to be coming back to it in a moment.

The questions arise when one asks how to understand the relationship between citizenship and these other involvements and affiliations. And Williams lays out two models (echoing what he said earlier in the lecture) – arguing that both models are ways of interpreting the Enlightenment heritage.

On the one hand, there is the model that says ‘all those other involvements and affiliations are an entirely private matter, which are permitted to exist, but which are not of truly public interest’. We as a state have no interest, this model would say, in what goes on in these communities and traditions that form the identities of our citizens (as long as they are law-abiding). The state simply deals with people who happen to have been formed in these ways, and makes sure that they don’t infringe each other’s rights: it tries to keep a level playing field on which people formed in all these different contexts can interact and compete. People who have been formed in these various contexts are publicly accountable as citizens, but these contexts themselves are not publicly accountable (except in the minimal sense that if they tend to produce law-breakers, the state will intervene).

Interactive Pluralism

The other model – the model that Williams favours – says that these communities and traditions, these contexts in which people are formed, are of public interest. This is a model that says that we as a state should protect these communities and traditions, and protect them as contexts in which social identity is formed, and protect the right of people to be formed by them – and also work to keep these communities and traditions together in a common public conversation: preventing them, as far as possible, from separating off into mutually exclusive ghettos. The state should be interested in keeping a conversation going between these traditions and communities, and between them and those outside them.

Rather than being allowed (or compelled) simply to go on in private, unaccountably, behind closed doors, these traditions and communities can be part of a system of mutual accountability.

And note that Williams thinks that the framework of universal rights is absolutely vital in this process. It is this framework that can keep the kind of public conversation he’s talking about from getting out of hand. It exists as a guarantee, he says, that ‘any human participant in a society is protected against the loss of certain elementary liberties of self-determination and guaranteed the freedom to demand reasons for any actions on the part of others for actions and policies that infringe self-determination.’ Or, putting it another way, he says that the framework of universal law is there to ‘prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.’

In other words, Williams is putting forward a model for a pluralist, liberal, state, governed by the impartial rule of law, that preserves Enlightenment values. Williams does not think that the model he is proposing is a step away from universality, a step away from the Enlightenment, a step away from the freedoms we have so painfully won over the last few centuries. Indeed, he thinks the model he is proposing is more accountable, more transparent, more realistic about how freedom is preserved, than the alternative model.

Human dignity

Williams’ lecture includes some reflection on what it means to recognize, beyond all the particular traditions and communities that form you, that you are also a citizen – and that whatever responsibilities and rights you might have because of your involvement in all those particular traditions and communities, there is in our state a set of responsibilities and rights that you have simply by virtue of being human (‘human dignity as such‘, he calls it).

On Williams’ reading, this means (amongst other things) that every person in a society (regardless of which particular communities they are or are not a member of) has a non-negotiable right to help shape the direction and ordering of society, and to do so as the particular person that they are (formed in all the particular ways they have been formed).

Back to sharia

We’ve rather lost sight of the specific issue of sharia. Williams’ claim is that in the kind of liberal pluralist framework he has been talking about – and only within the rather stringent limits he has set out – it makes good sense to think that individuals should be free to be part of a community that governs some aspects of its life by sharia, even if those forms of governance are different from mainstream forms of governance. There will have to be good reason for allowing the alternative (it will have to be judged to be a genuinely crucial element of the way a Muslim community arranges itself). It will have to be voluntary (so that no-one is forced to abide by this alternative procedure if they do not choose to do so – a matter that might require some really delicate handling if it is to be a real freedom). And it will have to be some procedure that is publicly accountable in terms of how it relates to the universal rights accorded to all British citizens. If (and only if) those conditions can be met, then we can have a situation in which a genuine alternative social vision is allowed to become part of the public conversation about how our lives should be ordered.

Williams suggests that the main areas where some such accommodation is likely to be possible: ‘aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution’. And, as he said in the accompanying radio interview, ‘as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law.’ Williams is arguing not for a radical departure, but for some fine judgments about the possible extension of our existing practice – fraught with difficulty though such extension will be.

The prize, however, is worth the effort, the difficulty and the risk that will be involved: Williams is trying to help us think how to deepen the hold that mutual accountability, freedom, and genuinely public discourse have on our lives. He is trying to help us think of ways to work against fragmentation and division – to work against the creation of cultural and religious ghettos isolated from the mainstream of public discourse. It is in pursuit of those aims that he urges us to ‘bring communal loyalties into direct relation with the wider society’ so as inevitably to ‘lead to mutual questioning and sometimes mutual influence towards change, without compromising the distinctiveness of the essential elements of those communal loyalties.’

That, it seems to me, is a vision worth pursuing.