Rowan Williams
The Most Reverend Father in God and Right Honourable Dr Rowan Williams (born 1950) is the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, a theologian, poet and lecturer.
Rowan Williams was born in Swansea, Wales, into a Welsh-speaking family. He has taught theology at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, where he was Dean of Clare College.
In 1991 he was elected Bishop of Monmouth, and in 1999 he was made Archbishop of Wales. In 2002 he was announced as the successor to George Leonard Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England and, therefore, leader of the Anglican Communion. He was enthroned on February 27, 2003.
Williams's selection as Archbishop was controversial; some evangelical Anglicans regard his opinions on the ordination of women as bishops and on homosexuality as excessively liberal. For the most part, however, his theology is generally considered to be orthodox.
Williams has been criticised in certain circles for his embrace of various tendencies which are considered by some to be "pagan". He courted controversy in August 2002 when he was inducted in the Gorsedd of Bards, an ancient Welsh order of Druids, and in March 2004, in a speech at Downing Street and in an article published in The Guardian, he praised Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, which was described by the Association of Christian Teachers as "shameless blasphemy" and by the Catholic Herald as "fit for the bonfire".
In the autumn of 2003 he wrote a foreword for a book of the lyrics of the Incredible String Band (who had strong influences of pre-Christian British spirituality and, at one point, embraced the creed of scientology); this has been cited by some as proof of the idea that British hippie culture was not as antithetical to establishment institutions as it may have seemed, a view held particularly by the late writer Ian MacDonald.
In March 2004 he criticised the ITV series "Footballers' Wives" for representing what he saw as the immorality of much contemporary British life, claiming that it reflected "a world in which charity and fairness, generosity, a sense of perspective about yourself are all swept aside."
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| Archbishop of Canterbury | Followed by:
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