Marginal Christianity

Roman Catholicism is rich and vibrant. But someone has to keep the Church honest. Professor Stanley Hauerwas poses for a portrait in Duke Chapel at Duke University. (Andy McMillan/For The Washington Post) By Stanley Hauerwas By Stanley Hauerwas Outlook October 27 at 12:06 PM Stanley Hauerwas, author of the forthcoming book “The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson,” is the Gilbert T. Rowe emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School. In the 1950s, Pleasant Grove, Tex. (now southeast Dallas), where I grew up, was a white working-class town where Catholics did not exist. For me, the religious “others” were Southern Baptists, whose distinctiveness was summed up in their refusal to dance. Our world was a Protestant world, and I was a Protestant, because what else would I be? For years, this sentiment sufficed. Then I began to learn about Catholicism. I have been thinking about Christianity for my whole life. I’ve spent my career as ...

Stanley Hauerwas ABC Religion and Ethics 3 Apr 2015 Through the cross, we have been freed from the necessities we inflict on ourselves in the name of 'peace', a peace that often turns out to be an order established and continued through violence. Credit: shutterstock   Nothing is more destructive to the Christian faith than the current identification of Christianity with love . If God wants us to be more loving, why do you need Jesus to tell us that? And if Christianity is about the forgiveness of our sins, then why did Jesus have to die? If God is all about love, in other words, why go through the trouble of being this man, Jesus? Why did God not just tell us through an appropriate spokesman (it could have been Jesus) that God wants us to love one another? God, in such a faith, becomes that great "OK" who tells us we are OK and, therefore, we are taught we should tell one another we are OK. But if Jesus is the proclamation of the great O...

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-p-klager-phd/the-vulnerability-that-ma_b_5579366.html Posted : 07/14/2014 12:41 pm EDT Updated: 09/13/2014 5:59 am EDT               I was privileged enough to chat with Stanley Hauerwas on how our theology impacts our perception of the Other, our political allegiances, and our desired response to our enemies. Nearly every article on Hauerwas mentions that TIME magazine designated him "America's Best Theologian" in 2001, so I guess I'll do the same here. He was also interviewed by Oprah. As the author of a veritable library and known as one of the world's foremost postliberal theologians, he was educated at Yale in a time when George Lindbeck and H. Richard Niebuhr graced its halls. Now the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Hauerwas is proud of his heritage as a bricklayer's son and freque...

I wrote in a facebook status earlier that two things I liked about today’s PCUSA gay marriage decisions at General Assembly are that nothing is imposed on any one and that it’s over and attention can be paid to other pressing matters.   I want to say and perhaps qualify those two statements in this blog post. I believe the decision to allow each clergy and church session to decide what their policy regarding gay marriage will be was the only decision that could be made if the denomination hoped to retain its more conservative churches.   A mandatory policy would have driven them all out. But this decision on a denominational level merely pushes the battle back in the local churches.   Every pastor and session knows the struggle and pressure of a request from grandparents to baptize their new grandchild even though the parents do not and do not intend to take the child to church even though our general polity rules such a thing out.   We shouldn’t do it but ...

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/stanley-hauerwas-on-reformation-sunday/ 29 October 1995 by Stanley Hauerwas Joel 2:23-32 – 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 – Luke 18:9-14 Wittenberg Door 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. I do not understand why it is part of the church year. Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days. Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success. But when we make Reformation a success, it only en...

What Makes America So Prone to Intervention? A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas, pacifist theologian, on Syria and why "humanitarianism" is a red herring. Noah Berlatsky Sep 5 2013, 2:54 PM ET 1 in Share More A crew checks and secures weapons on a US F-15 fighter aircraft at Aviano NATO base in 1993, when the U.S. was enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia.(Luciano Mellace/Reuters) Stanley Hauerwas, professor emeritus of theological ethics at Duke University , has thought a great deal about America's relationship with war. Probably the most influential pacifist theologian in the U.S. today, he has a lot to say about why the country can't seem to keep out of interventionist conflicts. As we contemplate another in the long list of U.S. military interventions, I talked to him about his theories and why he is skeptical of the various arguments for a strike on Syri...