Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwasis an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas is a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Before coming to Duke, Hauerwas taught at the University of Notre Dame. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
Date of Birth24 July 1940
CountryUnited States of America
It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God's creation.
One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.
Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.
Just as an athlete with natural gifts may fail to develop the fundamental skills necessary to play their sport after their talent fades, so people naturally disposed to faith may fail to develop the skills necessary to sustain them for a lifetime.
'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.
In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.
'It is finished' will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. 'It is finished' is a cry of victory.
Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.
The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us.
The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.
I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.
The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.