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
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.
One of the problems we currently have is there hasn't been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discussion that might be more helpful in terms of our ability to limit war.
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.
God knows we are subtle creatures who are more than able to use candour to avoid acknowledging our deceptions of others and ourselves.
God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.
I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.
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.
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.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.
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.
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.
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.