Zitat des Tages von Stanley Hauerwas:
Just as an athlete with natural gifts may fail to develop the fundamental skills necessary to play their sport after their talent fades, so people naturally disposed to faith may fail to develop the skills necessary to sustain them for a lifetime.
War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity.
The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.
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.
To know God's name is to know God.
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.
I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period.
Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.
Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.
Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?
'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.
Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.
The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.
A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape.
We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.
Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.
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.
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.
Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.
God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.
One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love.
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.
Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.
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.
Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.
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.
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 am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Israel knew that there was no greater gift than to be given God's name, but that gift was a frightening reality that threatened to consume her. Israel, who would be tempted by the idolatrous presumption she possessed God's name, rightly never forgot she could not say God's name.
To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.
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.
The problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that we're just so unbelievably powerful. And when you've got that kind of power, it's very hard not to use it.
When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection.
The world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished.
Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of - or perhaps better, because of - the world's fragmentation and divisions.
