Well, it's new to me...

I posted a link a couple weeks ago to an address given by Stanley Hauerwas in 1991. A few Google searches later, and I have found, courtesy of this blog, something slightly more recent, from 2002. It's always encouraging to find a voice saying things one oft has thought, whether it expresses them so well or so-so. Some highlights:

(Asked generally about September 11)

" People say that September 11 forever changed the world. That is false. The year 33 A.D. forever changed the world. September 11 is just one other terrible event in the world's continuing rejection of the peace God made present through the Resurrection."

"American Christians simply lack the disciplines necessary to discover how being Christian might make them different. For example, after the Gulf War, people rightly wanted to welcome the troops home, so they put yellow ribbons everywhere including the churches. Yet if the Gulf War was a "just war," that kind of celebration was inappropriate. In the past when Christians killed in a just war, it was understood they should be in mourning. They had sacrificed their unwillingness to kill. Black, not yellow, was the appropriate color. Indeed, in the past when Christian soldiers returned from a just war, they were expected to do penance for three years before being restored to the Eucharist. That we now find that to be unimaginable is but an indication how hard it is for us to imagine what it might mean for us to be Christian."

It would be interesting to know what period of history he's talking about, although I would assume it has to be sometime in the Middle Ages.

(Asked about homosexuality)

"The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers' market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it's interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn't about whether you're in love...

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn't know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married."

I remember C.S. Lewis saying something similar about marriage in Mere Christianity.

Hauerwas also (on the bottom of the first page) uses the word "image" as verb in the sense of "imagine," a usage I first encountered in Sharon Howell, my pastor throughout high school, who, like Hauerwas, grew up in rural Texas. The OED does list such a use of the verb "image" and even dates its first use all the way back to 1440! So I guess it's legitmate and no provincial innovation (or at the very least a rather old one). But I've still only ever encountered it in these two Texans.