It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
Rowan WilliamsRead
So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.
Interpretation
Creative acts aim to bring beauty and order to a chaotic world.
In this quote, Rowan Williams expresses the inherent desire within every act of creativity to rise above disorder and chaos. Creativity seeks to establish a sense of beauty and harmony, reflecting a profound human aspiration to impose order on the complexities of existence.
In practice
During a speech at an art gallery opening, to emphasize the importance of creativity in society.
It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.
Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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