Lord Rowan Williams - Honorary PhD
Citation by Rabbi Alex Goldberg
Pro Chancellor, other distinguished guests,
When Lord Williams stepped down from the post of Archbishop of Canterbury in 2012 he was asked what makes a good Archbishop. Borrowing a formulation from the Swiss Theologian Karl Barth he answered someone ‘with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other’… He said ‘You have to be cross-referencing all the time and saying, 'How does the vision of humanity and community in the Bible map onto … issues of poverty, privation, violence and conflict?' And you have to use what you read in the newspaper to prompt and direct the questions that you put to the Bible: 'Where is this going to help me?'
Along with a Bible and newspaper, Lord Williams himself manages also to have an academic paper or two up hiding up his clerical sleeves at the same time.
Rowan Williams is a polymath. His academic credentials are second to none: He first taught at Cambridge before being appointed to the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford at only the age of 36. From 1991, he commenced his episcopal ministry becoming Bishop of Monmonth, Archbishop of Wales in late 1999 before being elevated to Canterbury in 2002. From 2012-2020 he returned to academia as the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Lord Williams is also a poet, a linguist, speaking nine languages including Russian which he learnt whilst studying theology in order to read Dostoevsky in its original. He is simply one of the great public intellectuals of our age.
For us however, Lord Williams is also a friend of the University of Surrey having at one point become a Patron to the Development of the Multifaith Centre here. His guidance to our team and us as individuals has been invaluable. In agreeing to be a joint-patron with the late Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks 15 years ago, both provided us with an ethos, and an intellectual underpinning for Religious Life and Belief Centre, a 25 person team from eight faith and belief communities . Whilst Rabbi Sacks urged us to treat our university as a home from home where individuals from different backgrounds build a home together: Lord Williams taught us of the need to widen the doors of our home: to be more socially and more economically inclusive. Today it’s university policy.
I recall being invited to a conference at Magdalene on Education for Human Solidarity hosted by Lord Williams: gathered there were senior academics, intellectuals, faith leaders, educators and media specialists. He wanted our thinking to be more inclusive: not only based on our Sacred Texts, statistics, models of cohesion and pedagogy but also the lived experience of human solidarity on the street. So he took the step of inviting Cambridge’s homeless community to share their lived experience of human solidarity and started a deep, meaningful and vital dialogue with us. He had reminded us to welcome in the homeless into our intellectual towers and to empower them. It’s an important lesson that I have brought home here: community includes compassion, respect and inclusion. Lord Williams himself a Chaplain has reminded me that Chaplaincy is foremost about dignity and exploring the very concept of being human. In realising this, I relish the opportunity to take up his recent challenge that “rather than allow human rights and religious conviction to drift further apart, we should as a matter of urgency be seeking to clarify their significance for one another”.
Lord Williams: Thank you for being our guide, our teacher, our patron.
I know no one more than deserving of this honour from our University
Pro-Chancellor, it gives me great pleasure to present Rowan Williams, the Baron Williams of Oystermouth as eminently worthy of the Degree of Doctor of the University, honoris causa.
Pro-Chancellor, I warmly invite Lord Williams to invite the congregation.
