Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.
Interpretation
Christianity is more about lived experience than unattainable ideals or mere slogans.
In this quote, Stanley Hauerwas emphasizes that Christianity should not be viewed as an unreachable ideal or a set of catchphrases. Instead, it should be understood as a dynamic, lived experience that influences how individuals engage with their faith and the world around them. This perspective invites a deeper, more authentic practice of faith, focused on real-life application rather than a theoretical benchmark.
In practice
During a sermon about the practical application of faith.
My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.
Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.
War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.
The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.
Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
We only make peace with our enemies. That's why it's called making peace.
One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
There is no Master but the Master,” he said, “and QT-1 is his prophet.
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