Rowan Williams

Luminaries: Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian way

First published in Great Britain in 2019

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

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www.spck.org.uk

Copyright © Rowan Williams 2019

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-281-08295-7

eBook ISBN 978-0-281-08160-8

Contents

Introduction

St Paul (c.5–c.67)

A man of passions

St Alban (third century)

The duty of a Christian

St Augustine of Hippo (354–430)

Teacher of the inner life

St Augustine of Canterbury (c.530–604)

Apostle to the English

St Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033–1109)

The justice of God

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328)

The mystery of Godness

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556)

‘The word of God is not bound’

William Tyndale (1494–1536)

God and the economy of debt

St Teresa of Avila (1515–82)

A lived theology

John Milton (1608–74)

From heroism to fidelity

William Wilberforce (1759–1833)

The moral state

Charles Dickens (1812–70)

The truth of exaggeration

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)

The light of life

Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944)

Politics, art and prayer

Edith Stein (1891–1942)

Thinking in solidarity

Michael Ramsey (1904–88)

True humanism

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45)

Freedom, necessity and glory

Simone Weil (1909–43)

Waiting on God

Etty Hillesum (1914–43)

A compulsion to kneel

St Óscar Romero (1917–80)

God has injected himself into history

Introduction

This book is a series of reflections on people’s stories, and sometimes also their writings. It’s not a book that tells people’s stories or looks at their writings as a matter of historical interest alone. It’s about deciphering stories: deciphering stories and writings that themselves set out to decipher the world and help to illuminate it. It’s an attempt to make sense of lives that make sense of the world, and which may also help us make sense of God.

That ought not to be a surprising or novel observation, because, of course, that is very much what is going on in the New Testament. It’s no accident that Jesus ...