A Community Of Character Quotes

“The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community Of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“The church… stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community Of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“The problem with our society is not that democracy has not worked, but that it has, and the results are less than good.13 We have been freed to pursue happiness and “every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“For the Christian seeks neither autonomy nor independence, but rather to be faithful to the way that manifests the conviction that we belong to another. Thus Christians learn to describe their lives as a gift rather than an achievement.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“Moreover, because of the nature of the reality to which they have been converted, conversion is something never merely accomplished but remains also always in front of them. Thus growth in the Christian life is not required only because we are morally deficient, but also because the God who has called us is infinitely rich. Therefore conversion denotes the necessity of a turning of the self that is so fundamental that the self is placed on a path of growth for which there is no end.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“For the moral ideal of our society has been the autonomous, self-sufficient, free person. Autonomy has been taken to mean that we are not and should not be dependent on the past or upon others. To be free means to have no ties. Economically this has been reinforced by a capitalist economy that needs workers who are readily mobile. Politically the development of the autonomous person seemed necessary for democracy, since it is precisely the man without convictions that frees politics from ideological perversions. Democracy is the social order designed to eradicate the true believer in order to create the pragmatic man of compromise.8”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic