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Actions, not slogans, needed to end poverty: Dr Williams

by
02 November 2006

RELIGIOUS LEADERS should work together to offer practical help to those in poverty rather than "repeating slogans about the costs and evils of globalisation", the Archbishop of Canterbury said last week.

In a speech to the "Building Bridges" conference in Sarajevo - a dialogue for Christian and Muslim scholars - Dr Williams said that this would be "assisting people to exercise the creative responsibility which is God's gift and purpose for human beings".

In his speech, entitled "Christianity, Islam and the Challenge of Poverty", Dr Williams said that it was "impossible to deny that Christian and Muslims have a common agenda". He said that 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".

Although he said that, historically and theologically, the two faiths offered very different solutions, both had "a necessarily critical stance towards a society that has no means of limiting rivalry and acquisition".

Dr Williams said that there was nothing wrong with religious leaders' objecting to aspects of the current global-trade regime, as it was "a standing outrage that 'free trade' is commended to economically vulnerable nations by other nations who persist in protectionism".

But he said that religious believers should be among those who seek to "encourage the kind of enterprise that creates wealth in the form of employment" .

Dr Williams said that one of the most distinctive contributions made by religious communties was the active encouragement of local credit schemes.

"Whether in the shape of the Anglican 'Five Talents' initiative in Africa, or the Grameen banks of Muhammed Yunus in South Asia, there is a way of furthering economic maturity that belongs, most obviously, with religious conviction, simply because it assumes that a dependable local community, bound by trust and common commitment, is an ideal unit in which economic empowerment can take place."

He concluded by warning that religious and ethnic rivalry was in danger of obscuring a common commitment to address poverty. He said that, although the faith commitments of Muslims and Christians were different, "we do share a world, one which is scarred by all the varieties of poverty I have sketched."

The Archbishop of Canterbury was one of a number of religious leaders who gave papers at the three-day conference, which offered both public and private sessions.

Speaking at the reception to mark the end of the Christian-Muslim dialogue, Dr Williams said that in the part of Europe where the conference was being held "every community lives under heavy burdens, and one of those burdens is a history, a past of both guilt and suffering."

But he said that forgiveness and reconciliation "are the ways in which we bear each other's burdens, so that we do not deny, or run away from, our history, but together make something new from it".
www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

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