Quotes from Stanley Hauerwas

The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.

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.

I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie - 'Stanley and Livingstone.'

When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection.

War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

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.

In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.

At least one reason for trying to live lives that make a difference is that by so living, we hope we will not be forgotten by those who benefit from our trying to make a difference. Yet to try to insure we will not be forgotten too often results in desperate manipulative strategies that are doomed to fail.

To be a Christian is to be obligated to be charitable. This is true whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible.

God knows we are subtle creatures who are more than able to use candour to avoid acknowledging our deceptions of others and ourselves.

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.

The desire for money may be an indication of greed, but I want to argue that greed is a much more subtle vice than simply the desire to be rich.

'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.

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.

Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.

Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.

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.