Rowan Williams
Rwan Williams was born in Wales to a Welsh-speaking family. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, becoming Professor of Dviinty at Oxford. From 1992 to 2002 he was Bishop of Monmouth and from 1999 to 2002 he was also Archbishop of Wales. In 2002 he became Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus head of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. He is a patron of Affirming Catholicism, which promotes a liberal Anglo-Catholic position within the Church of England, including support for women bishops. His time at Canterbury has been marked by divisions within the Anglican Communion about gay issues and the position of women in the church.
LGBT issues
In 1989 Dr Williams (then a professor at Oxford) delivered the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address to LGCM. The lecture was entitled The Body's Grace and concluded:
- In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.
In 1989 he founded the 'Institute for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality' (which in 1996 became the 'Centre for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality'[1]).
