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
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.
It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification.
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.
Jesus made the final sacrifice for all, and we need not make it again.
Jesus is the politics of the new age; He is about the establishment of a kingdom; He is the one who has created a new time that gives us the time not only to care for the poor but to be poor. Jesus is the one who makes it possible to be nonviolent in a violent world.
I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.
'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.
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.
William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.
My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.
My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such a promise. In particular, she did not have to tell me when I was six.
My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.
Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.
American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.