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Enthroned two years ago as the 104th
Archbishop of Canterbury in a line that stretches
back to St. Augustine in 596, Rowan Williams
is a theologian and a poet. He is a native of
the Swansea Valley in Wales and the first Anglican
leader from outside of England since the Anglican
break with Rome in the sixteenth century. Deeply
influenced by the rich spiritual tradition of
Christianity, he also speaks forcefully on social
and political issues of his time, particularly
the impact of globalization, international environmental
treaties, and continuing conflict in the Middle
East. Archbishop Williams rigorously quarries
tradition to address "moments of significant newness"
in the history of the church. He has, in turn,
challenged Anglican clergy and scholars to find
ways of re-igniting the Christian imagination
in secularized Britain. The future archbishop
was educated at Dynevor Secondary School in Swansea
and won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge,
where he took first-class honors in theology and
studied philosophy of religion with Donald MacKinnon,
the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity. Initially,
at Christ Church College, Oxford, and then at
Wadham College, Oxford, he went on to study Russian
religious thought and earned a D.Phil. in theology
in 1975. His dissertation was on the theology
of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky, whose best known
work on the mystical theology of the Eastern church
deals with apophaticism described by the future
archbishop as "the primordial theological moment,
the moment of stripping and renunciation." During
his student years, Archbishop Williams began visiting
the Quarr Abbey, the Roman Catholic Benedictine
monastery on the Isle of Wright, where the prior,
Dom Joseph Warrilow, became a major mentor. He
was appointed a lecture in theology at the College
of the Resurrection in Mirfield in West Yorkshire
after taking his doctorate and ordained a priest
in the Church of Wales in 1978. A year earlier,
he had been appointed a tutor a Westcott House,
Cambridge, and in 1980, he was named a lecturer
in divinity at Cambridge. Archbishop Williams
became dean and chaplain of Clare College, Cambridge,
four years later, and, in 1986, he accepted the
Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at Oxford.
The university granted him the senior doctor of
divinity degree in 1989, and he was elected a
fellow of the British Academy the next year. He
was enthroned as Bishop of Monmouth in 1992 and
eight years later as Archbishop of Wales. He has
served for five years as president of the Bevan
Foundation, a think tank devoted to coordinating
community regeneration in Wales. As a scholar,
Archbishop Williams's principle academic focus
has been patristics, and an especially important
contribution to the field was his study of a fourth
century heretic condemned at the Council of Nicea,
Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987 and 2001). His
first book, however, was The Wound of Knowledge:
Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John
of the Cross (1979). It was followed by Resurrection:
Interpreting the Easter Gospel (1982), The Truce
of God (1983), which combines the case for nuclear
disarmament with a study of modern examples of
spiritual sickness, Teresa of Avila (1991), and
Open to Judgement (1994, 1996, 2001, and 2002),
a collection of sermons and other addresses. Among
his more recent works are Christ on Trail (2000),
a study of how each of the four Gospel writers
presents the arraignment of Jesus, Lost Icons:
Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (2000, 2001,
and 2002), a lament over the corruption of values
in contemporary society, On Christian Theology (2000), a collection of essays on fundamental
themes, Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons
of the Virgin (2002), and Writing in the Dust (2002), reflections on September 11, 2001 based
on his own experiences 200 yards away in Wall
Street the day that two hijacked passenger jets
flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
His first two collections of poetry, After Silent
Centuries (1994) and Remembering Jerusalem (2001),
were reissued with new material in 2002 by Perpetua
Press as The Poems of Rowan Williams. |
