Thinking After

  • No Humility without Humiliation (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “Humility, of course, is a tricky virtue. Have you ever known of any­one who successfully tried to be humble? Humility is usually something that happens to us, rather than something we do. I was once having a conversation with a friend in Ireland about sexual misconduct by priests. I asked him if the acknowledgment of this crime as sin might teach the church humility. He thought for a short time and then said, “Possibly, because there is no humility without humiliation.” The tax collector was humiliated, which made him an appropriate witness to the one alone worthy of worship.” (more…)

  • All Truth Will Finally Testify to the Trinity (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “Because God is Trinity, Christians have no fear of the truth no matter where it may be found. Jesus tells his disciples that the Spirit of truth will guide them into all truth. All that is has been created by the Holy Spirit, so that all truth testifies to the one who makes the Father known. (more…)

  • The Plague of Trinity Sunday Preaching (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “This is Trinity Sunday. Across Christendom preachers are trying to ex­plain “Trinity” to their congregations. God is one, but God is three. How can one be three we ask? Attempts to explain the Trinity I fear often result not only in dull sermons but, even worse, heresy. Even more debilitating is the reality that the heresy evoked by such attempts is not recognized as heresy. It is not even clear if the person that represents the heresy thinks being a heretic is a “bad thing.” (more…)

  • The Fears of the Courageous (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “Who you are, moreover, makes all the difference. The courageous know fears the coward can never know. Of course, cowards may be over­whelmed with fear, but they do not know the fears of the courageous, because the fears of the courageous are fears honed by being courageous. (more…)

  • Life Under the Law When We Are a Law Unto Ourselves (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “We do not think we live in a time when moral conventions (which is just another word for the Law) determine our lives, but we do. We may not quite be in a Jane Austen world, but we are close. Jane Austen lived in a world of clear social conventions in which everyone knew what was the right thing to do or say, particularly when you were at dinner. Her novels are relentless investigations of whether people who always seem to do the right thing, in fact, have a true heart. (more…)

  • Announcing the Publication of “Minding the Web”

    It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce the publication of Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections by Stanley Hauerwas with Robert J. Dean by Cascade Books.  The book is currently available for purchase through Wipf and Stock and in the days ahead will be available through many of your favorite book-sellers. (more…)

  • Sin, What it Is and What It’s Not (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “The good news is we do not get to be our own judge. We do not get to determine what our sins may be. The devil, the great tempter, would have us believe that we should want to be like that false god, who we assume to be self-sufficient, self-affirming, self-desiring, the supreme be­ing, self-centered and rotating about himself. The problem, of course, is that he is not the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. That God—the God that has come to us in Christ—is sufficient to Himself, but that suf­ficiency is the love that has constituted the life of the Trinity from all eternity. Our sin, quite simply, is our refusal to be loved by such a God.”[1. Stanley Hauerwas, “Repentance: A Lenten Meditation,” in Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections, edited by Robert J. Dean (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 213.] (more…)

  • On (Not) Knowing our Sins (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “That we may have the haunting thought we are only playing at being a sinner, I suspect, involves the more general worry that, in the world in which we now find ourselves, we are not at all sure if we know what it means to be a Christian. I suspect we are not even sure we know what being a Christian looks like. Surely, to be a Christian means more than being a nice person that believes stuff about God. There is, after all, the Sermon on the Mount. But then that is one of the problems: we cannot imagine living out the demands of the Sermon. But because we cannot imagine living the type of lives the Sermon seems to envisage, we cannot help but fear that we are only playing at being Christian. (more…)

  • Responding to “A Plea for Pointless Preaching” – A Guest Post by Lissa Wray Beal

    On Thursday, November 1, a surprisingly large and energetic group of pastors, professors, seminary students, and college students gathered at Providence to hear and engage in conversation surrounding my paper, “A Plea for Pointless Preaching.”  The paper was an abbreviated version of an essay that I wrote for Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections.  In the essay, I suggest that the work of “two Stanleys” – the evangelical mega-church pastor Andy Stanley and the theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas – present two contrasting homiletical paths open to preachers today.  Since that volume will soon be appearing in print, I will not be reproducing the essay here.  However, my colleague Lissa Wray Beal, who served as the respondent to the paper, has graciously allowed me to publish her insightful engagement with the essay here on the blog. (more…)

  • Life Under the Power of Death (Series on “Minding the Web”)

    “Consider how death is reported in the news. Those that produce the news seem to know that we have a morbid desire to know how some­one died—in an automobile accident—because, as Tolstoy observed, a passion for finding the “cause” of someone else’s death can be a way of satisfying ourselves that they died accidentally or fortuitously by virtue of special circumstances affecting the one who died (but not me). It seems that we are at once obsessed by death while striving in every way possible to conceal its power over our lives. Accordingly, we ask those charged to care for us when we are ill to do everything they can to get us out of life alive. This is yet another form of self-protection, as it means we then get to blame health-care providers for any miseries related to keeping us alive at all costs.”[1.Stanley Hauerwas, “Resurrection,” in Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 185.]

    This is the fifteenth in a series of posts highlighting captivating, provocative, or simply entertaining quotes from the forthcoming book Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections by Stanley Hauerwas edited by Robert J. Dean (Cascade).