“American democracy is a plutocracy. …The middle class doesn’t care who rules as long as they don’t lose their stuff.”

Last Thursday night Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, addressed the student body of The King’s College on the subject of avarice. He was the keynote speaker for the 2010 Interregnum, the college’s annual three day recess from classes when we explore a fruitful theme and a related great book.

Stanley Hauerwas is an odd man, but the sort of oddball that is good to know.

He is an Anabaptist Anglican from Texas, now living in North Carolina. He is too conservative to be acceptable to liberals (he believes the Bible and thinks sodomy is sin), but he is too liberal for the comfort of conservatives (he’s a pacifist and he’s married to a Methodist minister). He is pleasant company, and a stimulating thinker.

Over the course of the day with Prof. Hauerwas, between a morning conversation, a lunch discussion, the evening address, and the question and answer time that followed, I gleaned these nuggets of insight and provocation. (These are either quotations, or, more likely, fairly reliable near-quotations.)

Evangelicals know the Bible and they know today…and nothing in between.

Evangelicals are people who have a relationship with God, and attending church worship services is just how they express that. [If you don’t see the point, the joke is on you.]

We don’t hear sermons on greed (which is odd given that it’s such a prominent theme in the New Testament.) We know what lust looks like–but greed?

There was an increase in attention to greed by theologians after the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

America can never have enough power.

America runs on fear.

David Innes is an Assistant Professor of Politics at The King’s College in New York City. This article is taken from his blog, Principalities and Powers.

READ MORE QUOTES (including the context of many of the quotes): http://principalitiesandpowers.blogspot.com/2010/04/entertaining-hauerwas.html