I am not convinced that the U.S. is more religious than Britain. Even if more people go to church in America, I think the U.S. is a much more secular country than Britain. – Stanley Hauerwas
A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they’re not trying to escape. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat – those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers – struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war. – Stanley Hauerwas
I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period. – Stanley Hauerwas
Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success. – Stanley Hauerwas
One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love. – Stanley Hauerwas
In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created. – Stanley Hauerwas
I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation. – Stanley Hauerwas
Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual. – Stanley Hauerwas
Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities. – Stanley Hauerwas
I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished. – Stanley Hauerwas
The Gospel of John makes explicit what all the Gospels assume – that is, the cross is not a defeat, but the victory of our God. – Stanley Hauerwas
The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They’re not yours to do with as you please. They’re Christ’s. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity. – Stanley Hauerwas
‘It is finished’ is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work. – Stanley Hauerwas
I am just postmodern enough not to trust ‘postmodern’ as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods. – Stanley Hauerwas
The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology. – Stanley Hauerwas
Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs. – Stanley Hauerwas
I’m a happy and productive person. I’m very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I’ve got a lot of energy. – Stanley Hauerwas
To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don’t understand Islam to be a church. – Stanley Hauerwas