Stanley Hauerwas is to give one of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2008 on Religion and Human Rights. The title of his lecture is 'Pentecost: Learning the Language of Peace'. The date is 20 Feb, lecture starts at 5.30pm in the Holywell Music Room, Holywell Street, Oxford. Tickets for lecture is £6 (£4 concessions).
This morning I gave Stanley Hauerwas' new book The State of the University a quick read. Plenty to think about, as you would expect from a Hauerwas book, and lots to re-read another time. Coming to the surface occasionally through the book, as it wrestles with the place of the theology in the university amongst other things, are the questions what are universities for? and who do they serve? Two questions that Hauerwas believes its difficult to ask because we don't know the answer or like the answer.
Anyway, here is one quote I enjoyed, which is typical Hauerwas:
'We Methodists are heart people. Baptists have no heart at all. Instead Baptists have the Bible which they use a club to beat one another into submission' (p.132)
theologian. christian ethicist. pacifist. methodist. texan. american. professor of theological ethics at duke university since 1984. challenges religious platitudes. PhD in christian ethics from yale. DD from edinburgh. gifford lecturer at st. andrew's. was called america's best theologian by Time magazine in 2001. his book a community of character was named one of the 100 most important books on religion of the 20th century. taught at the university of notre dame from 1970-84. born in 1940. prolific, provocative and a polemicist. critic of american politics and morality. prophetic. author of over 22 books and of numerous articles. son of a bricklayer. fan of john howard yoder and pope john paul II. accused of being a sectarian. father and husband. 'shy of the thorough systematic ordering of theology' (wells, transforming fate into destiny, 1998). his theological journey moves from quandary to character, character to story, story to community, and finally from community to church (according to wells, transforming fate). believes the virtues and narrative are important for christian ethics. has written on a diverse range of topics from sex, abortion, war, disability, homosexuality, punishment, the family, courage, old age, postmodernity, worship, watership down, suffering, bonhoeffer, the church, non-violent terrorism, the bible, barth, september 11, and Jesus. he says 'I have never sought to justify Christian withdrawal from social and polictical involvement; I have just wanted us to be involved as Christians' (A Better Hope, 2001)
for more see 'stan the man: a throughly biased account of a completely unobjective person' by william cavanaugh (in The Hauerwas Reader, 2000), 'stanley hauerwas: where would we be without him' by mark thiessen nation (in Faithfulness and Fortitude, 2000), 'engaging stanley hauerwas' by l. gregory jones, reinhard hutter and c. rosalee velloso ewell (in God, Truth and Witness, 2005) and the many prefaces and introductions to hauerwas' many books.
Stanley Hauerwas (from the St Petersberg Times)
People care more about who their doctor is today than who their priest or minister is. Most Christians live lives of practical atheism. ... Atheism isn't explicitly a denial of God, it's to live in a way that God does not matter.
From his commentary on Matthew. (Thanks to Jim for his series of posts on the commentary. I'm trying not to spend so much money on books, so have not yet bought a copy)
"The parable
of the sower is not often considered by those concerned with the loss
of the church's status and membership in Europe and America, but it is
hard to imagine a text more relevant to the situation of churches in
the West. Why we are dying seems very simple. It is hard to be a
disciple and be rich. Surely, we may think, it cannot be that simple,
but Jesus certainly seems to think that it is that simple. The lure of
wealth and the cares of the world produced by wealth quite simply
darken and choke our imaginations. As a result, the church falls prey
to the deepest enemy of the gospel - sentimentality. The gospel becomes
a formula for "giving our lives meaning" without judgment. (Page 129)
'Possessed by possession, we desire to act in the world, often on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions...A church that is shrinking in membership may actually be a church in which the soil of the gospel is being prepared in which deeper roots are possible. (Page 130)
As Hauerwas is prone to do, he gets to core of the issue - christian discipleship and wealth don't mix. It reminds me of one of my favourite Hauerwas quotes 'discipleship is quite simply extended training in being dispossessed. To become followers of Jesus means that we must, like him, be dispossessed of all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others' (The Peaceable Kingdom, 1983, 86)
This will be part of the Centre for Theology and Philosophy's, at University of Nottingham (led by John Milbank), new series called Interventions.
I've just found this address by Stanley Hauerwas on a blog called Entangled States. Hauerwas discusses the work of Rowan Williams and especially William's concept of living in the present moment, especially in what Anglicans called Ordinary Time. This resononates with some of what Maggi Dawn was saying in her Greenbelt seminar The Rhythm of the Saints. It's just what I need to hear at the moment. Here's a small snippet:
Williams confesses that he longs for a Church more true to itself. Such a church would be one more determined to oppose war, a church capable of offering hospitality to resident aliens who may be gay, a church that can challenge the economic practices that perpetuate poverty. Williams believes his desire for such a church is Godly yet he believes he must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me--because what God asks of me is not to live in the future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than were we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. Living in the truth involves the same sober attention to what is there--to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see--with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings.
Taken from an interview here
[Dean Jones asks:] Bill has asked you a lot of questions, others have asked you several questions. What question would you like those of us gathered here to be thinking about as we depart from here?
What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?
I like Stanley Hauerwas. I like the way he writes a paper called 'Why gays (as a group) are morally superior to Christians (as a group).' I like the way he writes, showing that theology is always ethical. He has been described in the following way:
Stanley is a loud, blustery, locomotive of passion for the Gospel; his eyes deep, intense, penetrating, full of sparkle and fire; his discourses passion-filled, spluttering with expletives, crashing into everyone else's opinion in the room, his thoughts thundering into your consciousness - sometimes against your will, often making you angry at his lack of ... well ... senstivity. And yet. And yet ... You realize this is man who is so in love with the Gospel - so in its grip - that he must say what he says or the rocks will say it for him. There is such clarity about Stanley Hauerwas. You have no doubts about what he thinks, about what he believes. And, there is no question in our minds that his clarity often leaves him alone, isolated from those whose ideas are of the mind and not of the heart. There are times when he spoke that a kind of holiness filled the room and you knew you were hearing the words of a prophet, and when the interview was over there were tears in the eyes of the interviewers'
('The Door Interview', 1993, quoted in 'Stanley Hauerwas: Where Would We Be Without Him?' by Mark Thiessen Nation in Faithfulness and Fortitude, 2000, pp.19-20)
I like that description. Part of me wants to be like that, although without the need for the expletives. Part of me already is. These Hauerwasian traits though can get me into trouble. They can serve to make me appear uncomprising (which hopefully when it comes to the gospel I am), aggressive, argumentative and passionate. There's a bluntness and a truthfulness about Hauerwas' words which I like and admire. In a time where often the church appears to resemble nothing like or even pretend to resemble the gospel to which it claims to follow, the theology of Hauerwas unmasks the shallow and fakeness of the church's life and demands (as Bonhoeffer and Barth before him) that the gospel is more demanding and more costly than we want it to be. Too many characters like Hauerwas would dishearten the church, but without him and others, the church will continue to live in a type of Disneyland, entertaining but not discipling. I encountered Hauerwas first through the writings of John Colwell, who writes like a British version of Hauerwas, slightly softer, but no less blunt. Shall I continue to see Hauerwas as someone to emulate as a witness to the gospel or should I look for more tactful and diplomatic witnesses?
... Jesus called to himself a child - the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little, and poor. He placed the child 'in the midst of them,' as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. Jesus' act with the child is interesting. In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are often viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become "adults" like us. Adult members sometimes complain they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. "Send them away," many adults say. Create "Children's Church" so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.
Interestingly, Jesus put a child in the centre of his disciples, "in the midst of them," in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus' mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God's kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, countercultural, than his blessing of children.
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong, 1989, 96)
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