“[Knowing God]... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional,...” — Rowan Williams Quote

“[Knowing God]... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth..”

“In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.”

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

“At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen.”

“I have to go on being a priest and bishop, that is, to celebrate God and what God has done in Jesus, and to offer in God's name whatever I can discern of God's perspective on the world around - something which involves both challenge and comfort.”

“Just think of what would have happened to poor old Naaman if he had decided to dunk himself only once?”

“Now how can anybody look at that and not believe in God? I mean, how can anybody look at this and not believe there is some higher power, some divine force at work in the universe greater than Man, some god that created it, that created all this, that created us?”

“Bombs have kill-radiuses; churches should have love-radiuses--anyone within twenty miles of a church should know it.”

“salvation = given, not earned”

“Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy.”

“Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking Him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.”