A good friend, Chris Alford, recently lent me a most engaging biography of Rowan Williams, by Rupert Shortt.
Here is an extract from the Introduction.
The Welsh friend who described him as a 'recluse with a massive social conscience' was too pungent, but the comment contains more than a grain of truth. Besides, the Church was becoming a much more volatile place by the time Rowan appeared in the frame for Canterbury. The challenge of averting deep splits in the Anglican Communion would have been intractable, whoever was at the helm. As the crisis became even graver, many people thought that a major intellectual talent had been squandered in forlorn bids to reconcile factions on either side of the gay debate, and all the other arguments -- over biblical authority or church government or the limits of diversity -- for which disagreement about same-sex relationships is a proxy. And behind the public face, sympathetic observers saw a sensitive human being enduring a prolonged form of torture.
Not only did this book give me a fascinating insight into the life and ministry of Rowan Williams, but it also sparked some fresh thinking about disagreements in the church and the ways in which we might cope with them in a spirit of Agape. Not only Anglicans will find this an absorbing, candid and lucid book. I recommend it warmly.
In The Guardian , the reviewer claimed ..... Williams may have found the perfect biographer: authoritative yet accessible, acute and fair-minded, sympathetic but critical.
