The spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Dr Rowan Williams, has commented that faith communities had to promote confidence as well as earn the trust of those around them, so that they could tackle the common problems of the world.

|TOP|The Archbishop of Canterbury was speaking at a dinner in Washington during a Christian-Muslim conference. He spoke about the problems that all were facing, and highlighted that their coming together meant that differences had to been addressed seriously but that these differences should be viewed as common challenges.

Dr Williams stated, “We have recognised that we have a common agenda; we can't always say that we have identical convictions and certainly aren’t aiming to iron out the differences and the difficulties of our convictions but this is a world in which no one religious community, no one nation, no one interest group can solve problems alone...

“The ecological crisis that our planet faces is one that is no respecter of religious difference and there is one planet on which we live, global warming is theologically uneducated; rising water levels do not discriminate between Christians, Muslims, Jews or anyone else.”

|AD|Other attendees at the special dinner included Arab ambassadors based in the Washington region, and they heard the Church of England head speak out against the death sentence proposed for the Afghan Christian convert from Islam.

Dr Williams said it was “outrageous, unjust and exceptional” for a death sentence to be passed over Abdul Rahman, who had converted from Islam to Christianity.

He said, “None of us could have imagined how topical the work of our conference would seem in the light of the very complex and tragic situation in Afghanistan, with the death sentence threatened to a Christian convert there.”

The Archbishop stressed that people had to be weary not to create cultural stereotypes in approaching various situations.

He insisted that the challenge was to earn trust: “It's not just a matter of the Islamic world being asked to adopt uncritically a ‘Western-model’, secular human rights framework with all the conceptual and practical problems that entails, but working out what it would be like to live in a world where different societies recognised the credibility, the justice and the legitimacy in each other because there were certain things they could be secure about; certain areas where they did not think they would come up against outrageous, unjust and exceptional threats such as the Afghan incident represents.”