As a person who has considerable influence over the Church in Wales, do you view it as a truly Welsh institution?

Certainly since disestablishment it's a more obviously Welsh institution, though in the early years of the Independent Church in Wales it was still very much run by the English-speaking landed gentry and professional people. I think that's changed. The bilingual policy of the province has developed quite a lot. We still have some way to go but the Governing Body is fully bilingual - anyone can address the Governing Body in Welsh. Even in the Electoral College of Bishops now we've established the principle that proceedings can be conducted in both languages, so it's spreading. And I suspect it's also become a bit more of a Welsh institution at a time when other Welsh institutions are fading a bit - there aren't that many with a lot of vigour about. I think that the further development of the Church in Wales as a Welsh institution is a perfectly proper and natural process that I would want to be involved in. To some extent how successful that is will depend on how the language itself and the Welsh sense of Wales evolve.

…What are your views on the recent fuss regarding the ordination of women and homosexuals in the Church?

I've always supported the ordination of women - that hasn't been a problem for me for many years, though I'm aware of how deep a problem it is for some. The question of the ordination of homosexuals is quite a bit more complicated. I don't have a great theological problem about it, but my Church does, therefore I'm not in a position simply to change policy on the hoof. What interests me in all this is the way in which issues about sex and gender have come to dominate so much of the internal debates in the Church, and that's very telling. Some of it is that we've unwittingly bought into the sex obsession of the wider culture, as if these were the really important human issues and nothing else much mattered. We seem to have been saying: "What's different about the Church? Well, we have different views on sex." Whereas why haven't we said: "We're different because we have different views on violence" or: "We have different views on wealth and poverty", because at various points of Christian history that's been true. But now it's sex that's our great marker and if I was a bit harsh I'd say that it's an easy marker - it doesn't cost too much, whereas wealth and war are a little more dangerous.

…You have recently said that the bored and cynical nature of contemporary society is a matter of education - that we set ourselves too many targets and don't leave room for our imaginations to flourish. Do you think there's a way out of the highly bureaucratised education system we've created for ourselves?

I have quite strong feelings about highly bureaucratised education and a lot of commitment to the primary values of imagination in education - I read too much Richard Hoggart when I was at school, you see! I'm very sceptical about how useful compulsive testing is because it seems to me to lower the horizon. I'm also very suspicious of the idea that there's a panacea to the shortfall in teaching provision by way of using more IT. I don't think that will do. The conversational mode of education is absolutely primary. What I've sometimes argued is that computers are binary systems - they're "yes" or "no" systems. The most important moments in education are when you come back and say: "Actually, there's no 'yes' or 'no' answer to this one. We've got to re-think the question." Computers don't necessarily get you to do that. Idealistically, I would like to see smaller schools as the norm but that of course means a huge injection of cash and resources.

…How do you see the future of the Welsh language in Wales?

It's a very uneven picture. On the one hand you can say that the statistics look wonderful with soaring numbers of Welsh learners and Welsh speakers. But I listen in to Welsh learners and speakers in this part of Wales, especially at schools, and I note that a child may be going to a Welsh-medium school yet not using the language outside it. Perhaps there's a bit of a class element here - many middle-class people send their kids to Welsh-medium schools, and that's fair enough. But the question is where do they take the language and where do they use it naturally? There's also a metropolitan Welsh-speaking culture, which is getting more sophisticated but at the same time it can be rather hermetic. So the statistics don't tell us everything here. We need some careful social observation beyond the figures.

…You were in New York on 11 September to deliver a lecture at Trinity Church, just a couple of streets away from the World Trade Centre. After the terrorist attacks you wrote Writing in the Dust, advising a cautionary response. This advice was, of course, ignored. How do you feel now about the continued military presence in Afghanistan?

To me the painful question in this is does anybody feel safer now? I think the answer is "no", so the response to 11 September that we involved ourselves in did not address the fundamental question. We have not yet identified and destroyed the source of our fear because we went looking for it in the wrong place. We went looking for it in men wearing turbans in foreign countries, whereas the real source of fear, terror and instability is a whole complex of relationships of power and misunderstanding which our world is meshed in. It breaks my heart to see how little so many people of perfectly good will in the United States and elsewhere can see that that's the issue. It's a kind of short cut: "We're frightened. We're frightened because we're being threatened. We're being threatened by them. Get rid of them and we won't be threatened."

…Very often we come to issues about violence with very low expectations as if we assume that violence is what's most natural to human beings. It certainly looks like it but that's one of the things that a religious believer is just not free to say. A religious believer in my tradition believes that we're made in the image of God and God is that reality from which violence is totally absent. So there's something fundamental about human beings which is oriented in another way but we don't work hard enough in finding it.

…You're an accomplished poet. Do you think that literature, and especially poetry, has something special to give to society?

Human beings are beings who have fun with language - it's one of the things they do. They play around with language and explore themselves in it. A dead language - a language that's not always generating new metaphors - produces dead and boring human beings. So it's not that poetry needs to be socially engaged - there are some good socially engaged poets and there are some good not very socially engaged poets. The real point is what you're doing with and for the language. Anything that intensifies and enhances the sense of linguistic excitement and richness is actually good for people.

…All of your writing - poetic, theological and political - consistently challenges the reader to think again about our certainties and responses. Would you agree that the challenge to conventionality is the strongest element of your writing?

Probably, yes, because my religious and theological loyalty was engaged very early on by how you cope with emptiness, suffering and death. That's where the heartbeat of my religious commitment lies and it's also very much true of my poetry. I'd point to a poet of faith like George Herbert and say look at what he's doing - it's not at all as cosy as some people think it is. Again he's pushing the boundaries: "Is God still there if I say this? What if I say this to God? Is He still there? What if I say 'get lost' to God?" It's a sort of enactment through poetry of what faith is. It's not a liberal shrugging off of commitment. It's saying, rather, how far does commitment take me? What can I grasp if I keep on pushing? In Herbert, of course, what happens is God pushes back. When the poet says "get lost" to God, God answers: "No"! So you're pushing the boundaries but the boundary then appears; you arrive at something. And that's what I try to achieve - yes, it's about challenging certainties and responses but it's also about searching for a certainty that's plausible and credible.