The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, serves as a spiritual leader to the world’s 85 million Anglicans. He was also once an executive in the oil industry, and his background in business and international finance led to his appointment, in 2012, to the UK Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. He participated in a Talks at GS session at Goldman Sachs in London, where he discussed his experiences in business, the role of religious leadership in modern society and the need for international and interfaith cooperation in solving today’s global challenges.
On addressing religious extremism: “Religiously motivated violence is not [something] that can be dealt with [by] one country. It’s global. It will take generations to deal with this issue. It must involve the use of force because you have to contain people who are killing other people and torturing them. It must involve mediation, negotiation. It must involve the use of social media. It’s a multi-layered problem, but it must also involve leaders of the mainstream faiths who are being outmaneuvered at every moment at present. It must involve us meeting with each other, looking each other in the eye and improving the quality of our own debate with integrity.”
On the Syrian refugee crisis: “In Europe we need to draw on the generosity of our tradition and have more confidence about the wealth of our economies and our capacity to absorb, to heal and to provide the means for people to return.”
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