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.
Stanley HauerwasRead
Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.
Interpretation
Death challenges the meaning of our words and actions by instilling a fear that life might lack significance.
In this quote, Stanley Hauerwas reflects on the profound impact of the awareness of death on our communication and existential concerns. He suggests that the inevitable reality of death instills a fear that can render our words and lives futile, prompting a deeper reflection on the significance of our actions and how we choose to express ourselves in the face of mortality.
In practice
During a eulogy, to highlight the importance of cherishing our words and actions.
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.
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.
We who don't want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.
The questions asked at the end of lie are very simple ones: Did I love well? Did I love the people around me, my community, the earth, in a deep way? And perhaps, Did I live fully? Did I offer myself to life?
This is the first thing I have understood:_x000D_ Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.
Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
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