Video of “Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana: Schooling the Heart in the Heart of Texas”-Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University. Keynote address at the 2003 Pruit Memorial Symposium, “The Schooled Heart: Moral Formation in American Higher Education.” (01:38:52)
“William Cavanaugh, a friend and fellow theologian, has this to say about Hauerwas’ tough nature: “Indeed, of all the great Christian pacifists over the centuries–Hippolytus, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King–Stanley Hauerwas is the one I would want on my side in a bar fight.” Hauerwas himself says one reason he so loudly proclaims his non-violent ethic is that others might keep him from killing someone”
“The God that is called forward to God Bless America is not the God of Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t think our sexual ethics need to be reworked; I think we need to live them”.
“I say I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive,” he says. “But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all”.
“I can enter into just war considerations. And it’s not clear to me at all that the war in Afghanistan has been begun or fought on just war grounds. Particularly, it’s not clear who the war is against. Who’s your enemy? Under what conditions do they know that they can surrender? I just think all of that has remained completely ambiguous.”
“Hauerwas believes theology should be taught as if it were true. He also believes that doing so has more profound implications for the church and society than most of us realise”.
“He is largely orthodox theologically and robustly critical of theological liberalism. But his condemnation of American patriotism, distaste for religious conservatives, frequent resort to profanity, and ambivalence about homosexuality have prevented his being an ally to evangelicals in his own United Methodist denomination”.
“But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of the terror September 11, 2001, names? I vaguely knew when I first declared I was a pacifist that there might be some serious consequences. To be nonviolent might even change my life. But I do not really think I understood what that change might entail until September 11”.
“I want people to get past the idea that they understand Christianity because they went to Sunday school,” Hauerwas says, in what sounds like a habitual tone of good-natured belligerence. “You have to learn how to do it. You have to undergo an apprenticeship. Nobody really wants to love their neighbor as themselves. That’s just not natural. So you have to see other people living it to find out what it means.”
