Rowan Williams

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2002

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Rowan Williams grew up in Swansea and Cardiff. He enjoyed reading, being outdoors and acting in school plays. He remembers attending church every day in Holy week, getting involved cleaning out the store rooms and making a bonfire of the rubbish. In his later teenage years he was inspired by the excellent choir, youth activities and Canon Eddie Hughes, vicar of All Saints, Oystermouth. Rowan went to Cambridge to study theology and for a time he was torn between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. He decided on the latter and soon after, when he was 28 years old, he was ordained as a priest. He spent the next few years lecturing and working with students and the local community. He became professor of Divinity at Oxford University.

He left academic work to take up the post of Bishop of Monmouth in 1991 and in 1999 he was elected Archbishop of Wales. Rowan was officially confirmed on 2nd December as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is also a philosopher, a poet, and a linguist who speaks seven languages. He has written a number of books on the history of theology and spirituality and published collections of articles and sermons as well as two books of poetry.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Opening of Solo Cello Suite 1 in G Major by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Collection of poems by W H Auden Luxury: A piano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this Christmas is a priest. Born in Swansea, he went from grammar school to Cambridge. He toyed with the idea of becoming a monk, but took up academic life instead.
0:38.0	By the age of 36, he was the youngest professor at Oxford. Six years later, he'd chucked it all in to become
0:44.2	Bishop of Monmouth a backwater some said but this clever theologian was unlikely to
0:49.3	stay out of the limelight for long his many books and his thoughtful views, conservative on many
0:54.6	doctrinal matters but liberal on social issues, marked him out as a leader in his
0:59.4	church. And so it came to pass. He became the Archbishop of Wales and then this month the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.
1:08.0	It's something I've been asked to do, he says, and I must do it with as much conviction and as much joy as I can.
1:15.8	He is Rowan Williams.
1:17.6	Is there a hint in that remark, Archbishop, of reluctance, do I detect? A man doing his duty? I think it's very difficult when you're
1:26.4	faced with any big job to see it entirely positively because you know your own inadequacies
1:31.8	you know we are likely to fail and if you've
1:34.3	got any sense at all you know that failing hurts so yes looking at the size of the
1:38.2	job and knowing about the failure that's inevitable it's difficult you've had time time to anticipate it and indeed I mean such a leaky system this
1:46.2	appointment of the art we seem to have known really most of the year that you were going
1:49.9	to be it.
1:51.3	Did you sort of know too? Lots of people clearly knew a great deal more than we did at home about it.
1:56.0	But as I say at the end of the day, it's something I've been asked to do.
2:00.0	If you've been asked to do it, then as a Christian you believe that God gives you the resources to do it
2:05.4	at least without failing totally you hope and so yes although you have called
2:10.8	it undewable you have said it's a bit of a nightmare.
	...

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