Two Hauerwas Quotes

I’m back to my old, lazy ways of barely getting in a post a week, and even then, just quoting someone else and commenting on it. Since being reactive is so natural for me, I often question why it is considered a bad thing.

Also, I'm currently trapped in a house with 3 to 6 cabin-fever-infected children, as school has been closed due to the extremely cold weather here. I'm posting this while children are running around me in circles spraying each other with fire extinguishers and wiping our remaining food supplies on the walls.

Posting Hauerwas quotes is not only easy and entertaining, but also something I am able to do with children running amok. I would hope this would be a source of pride for Stanely, rather than shame. For those unaware of Stanley Hauerwas, he is a Methodist theologian at Duke, and worked a lot with John Howard Yoder, who is the St. Augustine of Mennonite Pacifism. Or perhaps the Thomas Aquinas? Mennonites should weigh in here. For that matter, who would Hauerwas be in this metaphor?

Anway, here are the quotes, which I'm not even going to comment on now.

Quote 1 (My favorite Hauerwas quote):

“Why say carefully what you can say offensively?”

Quote 2: Where he relates his contribution to ecumenism (religious unity) and how he became a pacifist, when he presented a paper that defended John Howard Yoder’s work at a Notre Dame/Valpraiso meeting:

I began my presentation by noting that what I was going to do before these Lutherans and Catholics was a genuine ecumenical effort. It featured a Methodist with a doubtful theological background (if you are Methodist you have a doubtful theological background) representing a most Catholic department of theology, reading a paper to a group of Missouri Synod Lutherans and saying that the Anabaptists had been right all along. I said that it was an ecumenical gesture because, by the time I finished, the Catholics and Lutherans would discover how much they had in common – namely, thinking it a very good thing to kill the Anabaptists. And, of course, that is exactly what happened, as the Catholics and Lutherans joined forces to try to show me why we should not take Yoder seriously. Serious people understand that sometimes you do need to kill somebody. I was not convinced, and the rest, so to speak, is history.