Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence.
— Stanley Hauerwas
A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape.
The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.
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.
I was raised in an evangelical Methodist church. Evangelical meant that though you had been baptized and made a member of the church on Sunday morning, you still had to be 'saved' on Sunday night. I wanted to be saved, but I did not think you should fake it.
Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.
The idea is that Jesus overcame death through the Resurrection. What that does is fail to appreciate the fact that the resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ. It's not like, 'Oh, that was just a mistake, now it's over.' Jesus continues to suffer from our sins.
Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They're not yours to do with as you please. They're Christ's.
Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.
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.
I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are.
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.
In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college.
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.
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.
