Quotes from 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.

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

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.

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.

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 British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.

I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.

We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.

I simply cannot get over what a surprising and wonderful life God has given me.

I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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.

Jesus made the final sacrifice for all, and we need not make it again.

God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.

Our hope in life beyond death is a hope made possible, not by some general sentimental belief in life after death, but by our participation in the life of Christ.

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.

William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.

By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God.

The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.

I should like to think how we write as theologians would reflect our confidence in the One who makes that writing possible. That is one of the reasons, moreover, that the scriptures remain paradigmatic for how we are to write.

Many who become theologians in our time think their task is to try to determine how much of what has passed for Christianity they still need to believe and yet still be able to think of themselves as Christians.

The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.

The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.