Rowan Williams wrote a brief essay for this week’s Newsweek that summarizes much of what he said last week at the Trinity Institute. The essay is available online. In it, he points out pervasive the use of economics to understand relationships (customer, consumer, for example, even in the church), and how any perspective that narrows the range for understanding human being to a single factor diminishes humanity. He concludes:

Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God.

He consistently stressed during the institute the importance of both a full account of human being and developing ways to nourish fuller human being. If that truly is the goal, not just of political institutions, but of churches as well, then one might think finding ways of nourishing people who find fuller human being in same-sex relationships, and nourishing those life-giving relationships, ought to be a priority as well. Of course, he argued just that in essays written long before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.