It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the shared mission of Christianity and Islam in expressing God's purpose for humanity.
Rowan Williams speaks to the common ground between Christianity and Islam, emphasizing that both religions aspire to manifest a divine vision for humanity. Despite differences, at their core, both faiths seek to cultivate a community that embodies God's will, advocating for the greater good and ultimate purpose of human existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in an interfaith dialogue to emphasize collaboration between Christians and Muslims.
As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.
A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.
I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; Filths savour but themselves.
The promise of the American Dream requires that we are all provided an equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to our nation.
And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.
Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
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