Douglas Knight

What might be some of the most basic faith-derived or faith-related values that we might want to put into our present crisis and its challenges? And I’ll simply suggest three. First – keeping promises. On the whole, religious people believe in a divine agent, power or presence that is faithful, consistent, dependable, truthful. As we [...]

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The idea that any action, however extreme or disruptive or even murderous, is justified if it averts failure or defeat for a particular belief or a particular religious group is not really consistent with the conviction that our failure does not mean God’s failure. Indeed, it reveals a fundamental lack of conviction in the eternity [...]

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If it is true that, as Tertullian said, ‘one Christian is no Christian’, then by the same token we should be able to say, ‘one bishop is no bishop’, and so ‘one local church alone is no church ‘. A bishop is not an individual who ‘represents’ the local church as if he is empowered [...]

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Some 18 different groups – mostly of Catholic and evangelical inspiration, mostly small outfits – have united to oppose the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in a campaign called Passion for Life. But it has failed to make much impact in the media. The pro-abortion and pro-embryo research lobbies are far more powerful, far better [...]

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My Archbishop was given the title Civil and Religious law in England: A Religious Perspective.
But my Archbishop did not say that ’some aspects of Sharia law “seem unavoidable”‘, as is widely reported.
He said that
‘a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to [...]

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The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

In other words, the reporting of this lecture was untruthful. Lambeth does understatement, I do understatement. Do you really need me to say ‘They [...]

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The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a speech entitled Civil and Religious Law in England: a religious perspective
In contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law…
If the law of the land takes no account of what might be [...]

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In our own country, it seems to be assumed by many that if we could only get the relation between ‘faith communities’ right, social harmony would inevitably follow. And conversely, any expression of a belief that one’s own religious loyalty is absolute, any statement of the belief that I, as a Christian or a Muslim [...]

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Slippage can occur between thinking compassionately about exceptional cases and losing the sense of a normative position.
This is not an argument for unalterable prohibitions in law against abortion in every circumstance – or against divorce or civil partnerships; there is room for disagreement over appropriate legal provision in all these areas. But it is [...]

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The presence of the Church, not as a clamorous interest group but as a community confident of its rootedness in something beyond the merely political, expresses a vision of human dignity and mutual human obligation which, because of its indifference to popular success or official legitimation, poses to every other community a special sort of [...]

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will tonight give an address at Toynbee Hall, in which he will call for a widening of the debate on multiculturalism beyond narrow considerations of ethnicity or nationality, and to take in arguments about globalisation and commerce.
Delivering the lecture, Dr Williams will address the question of the homogenisation [...]

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Christianity teaches that each person is created by God with a distinct calling and capacity. For the Christian believer, human dignity – and therefore any notion of human rights – depends upon the recognition that every person is related to God before they are related to anything or anyone else; that God has defined who [...]

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Now what the events of Good Friday and Easter tell us is that every single human being is implicated in something profoundly wrong. We say, rather glibly, that Jesus died for our sins, that he died to save humankind – and thereby we say that we are all in need of something we cannot find [...]

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The debate triggered by certain decisions in the Episcopal Church is not just about a single matter of sexual ethics. It is about decision making in the Church and it is about the interpretation and authority of Scripture. It has raised, first of all, the painfully difficult question of how far Anglican provinces should feel [...]

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In the last century especially, Anglicans have become more and more aware of the theological and spiritual resources of their brothers and sisters in the East; it is not too much to say that both the thinking and the piety of Anglicans would have been unrecognizably different without this growing and thankful awareness; and many [...]

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One of the most chilling things on this journey to the Holy Land was the almost total absence in both major communities of any belief that there was a political solution to hand. So step back from that for a moment and ask, ‘What do both the communities in the Holy Land ask from us [...]

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has defended the rights of university Christian Unions, saying that Student Union bodies should not discriminate against them simply because they don’t approve of their views.
“The danger in issuing sanctions against a body whose views you disapprove of is that it looks like a fear of open argument. [...]

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‘He comes the prisoners to release, In Satan’s bondage held.’ These are words from one of my favourite Advent hymns, ‘Hark the glad sound!’ And they draw our minds towards an aspect of Christmas that is often neglected because we prefer some of the ’softer’ elements in the story.
Jesus of Nazareth was born, [...]

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The Christian Church began as a reconstructed version of the notion of God’s people – a community called by God to make God known to the world in and through the forms of law-governed common life – the ‘law’ being, in the Christian case, the model of action and suffering revealed in Jesus Christ. It [...]

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So when we think about the processes of production, about the whole pattern of an economy, we should be asking in what sense it is intelligent production – work directed towards the maintenance of a recognisably human environment. That recognisably human environment is, for the Christian believer, one in which the habits of self-examination and [...]

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