Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon at Canterbury Cathedral

The Archbishop of Canterbury - Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon at Canterbury Cathedral

And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising, often highly sexualised advertising, we shall worry you about your prospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing - which is 'independence', turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won't need too much maintenance.

The whole sermon is worth a read, not too long, but I especially liked this bit about how society treats children. The whole sermon is about an appropriate dependancy, on god and each other.

Rowan Williams - the church needs to listen properly to the bible

Rowan Williams gave a lecture on this topic in Canada recently, link to full text below. But I want to quote once section in particular speaking about scripture...

"... a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate".

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/070416.htm

Warning, it's pretty dense stuff :-)

Rowan Williams sermon - slave trade

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/070327.htm

above is a link to the archbishop's sermon from the service that marked the 200 year anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. for those a the lent course this is the service that jean mentioned.