The Little Friar

"As a way to challenge such a [liberal] view of freedom, I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds.   Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me .  I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities.  Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds." -- Stanley Hauerwas, "Christian Schooling  or  Making  Students Dysfunctional", in  Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified   ( Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 220, emphasis added. 

Stan Hauerwas on what it means to be a Christian: This speaks for itself.

One of my professors from seminary, Stanley Hauerwas, has assessed American Christianity, and it didn't turn out so well .  He claims we're "too spiritual", that the concerns and life of the Church have become other-worldly and detached from life right here and right now.  The church rarely prays, "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven".  Rather, the prayer is, "May we get to heaven when we die". I witnessed this yet again yesterday.  So, I have to admit:  Stan is onto something here. Take, for example, the word love  in the Church these days.  Has that word been overly spiritualized? I think it has. Christians often say that they "love everyone".  Their faith compels them to extend love to every person on the planet, friend and enemy alike.  But how do Christians understand this call to love?  What does it mean to love people? As best I can tell, it means the following: To love someone is to wish that they go to heaven. ...

I'm not a supporter of Barack Obama for any number of reasons.  Not least of which is his support of Reinhold Niebuhr .  I'm a Christian pacifist, and I think being a pacifist is made possible only because I'm a follower of Jesus Christ.  Being a follower of Jesus Christ, I think, is the only cure for the realism that pervades our culture's thinking about violence and war. Realism is a political theory that views politics as a realm shorn of all moral and ethical constraints. Sometimes called "power politics", a realist politics is not motivated by concerns for the common good or virtue, but rather by self-interest, necessity, and most of all, maximization of power.   According to realism, politics is seen as limited only by power constraints, not by ethical constraints about what may or may not be just.  Realism can be summed up as "they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get...