Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

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Stanley Hauerwas

Profession : Theologian

Birth : July 24, 1940

'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

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

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

From the beginning, Christianity has struggled to sustain the creative tension between the personal appropriation of the gospel and the gospel's universal reach.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.

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 cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

Stanley Hauerwas

Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas