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
The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.
The problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that we're just so unbelievably powerful. And when you've got that kind of power, it's very hard not to use it.
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.
Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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.
Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of - or perhaps better, because of - the world's fragmentation and divisions.
I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.
The 'Cold War' impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we.
God knows we are subtle creatures who are more than able to use candour to avoid acknowledging our deceptions of others and ourselves.
The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God's creatures is not clear.
I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.