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Williams pays for non-violence advertisement

by a staff reporter

The Archbishop of Canterbury has funded an advertisement advocating non-violence. Dr Williams contributed more than £1500 from his Discretionary Fund to the full-page advert, which appears in this week’s Church Times.

The advert has been produced by Graham Carey, a member of Brad­ford diocesan synod. He met the Arch­bishop in July to discuss the text.

Among the names of those endorsing the advert are Dr Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town; Dr John Neill, the Archbishop of Dublin; and Mary Midgley, the philosopher. In line with Lambeth Palace policy, Dr Williams’s name does not appear.

The advert begins: “We are not all pacifists, but we declare ourselves as individuals dedicated to personal and institutional nonviolence.” It encompasses global conflict: “We question the political usefulness of ward and find it ethically and ecologically unsustainable.”

But it also tackles personal violence: “We are reminded by our divorce courts of the almost ‘natural’ extent of abuse that takes place in our homes. On every evening of the year, homes are flooded by an im­mense quantity of televised killing and unremitting brutal harm; rude, aggressive, power-driven personal­ities; and an almost total absence of reflective, mature material from the great wisdom traditions.”

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