The main thing that struck me, as I read Rupert Shortt’s biography of Rowan Williams, was how amazingly sheltered the Archbishop of Canterbury’s life has been. I don’t mean economically privileged (most of us are pretty much on a level in this respect), or emotionally easy (whose is?) – I mean ideologically and institutionally fixed.
He decided as a boy that he would be a priest and theologian, and never had any trouble getting there. (His career plan met as many obstacles as that of Martin Amis, who is one year older, which feels a bit wrong.) He never had a period of adulthood, or even adolescence, in which he wondered what to do with his life, in which he dipped even a toe into another form of life. He has always belonged to the subculture of Church, and since undergraduate days it was obvious that he would have a successful career in it, and the universities joined to it.
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