Dr. Rowan Williams Wednesday delivered his first major address on interfaith relations since becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury in which he criticised the secular view of treating religion as a separate and subordinate sphere of life.
One of the most important tasks of religion in our culture, I'd dare to say, is to challenge the secularist to produce good and coherent grounds for their goals, he said.
This, the archbishop said, was made all the harder by the assumption "that 'religion' is a subdivision of human activity which belongs among the optional extras, after you have attended to the clear imperatives of non-religious public life."
He argued that the secular assumption must also "strive to make itself credible," saying that when this was refused "we have a mirror image of theocracy - an uncriticised ideology defining the terms of public life."
In his address at Birmingham University, the recently appointed religious leader of the Church of England also challenged some of the basic assumption about relations between faith communities and called for a new approach to the dialogue between religions.
He called for a clearer appreciation and understanding of the "very disagreements about the kind of universe we inhabit, what that universe makes possible for human beings and what is the most truthful or adequate or even sane way of behaving in the universe."
"Once we are clear about the nature and scope of religious disagreement, we are actually more rather than less likely to develop a respectful and collaborative practice in inter-faith relations," the archbishop said.