Stanley Hauerwas is always worth listening to.  Here he is in a recent interview with ABC’s Scott Stephens:

“Atheism is so uninteresting in America.  Atheism in general is uninteresting in our world, because the god being denied isn’t the Christian God.  That’s the reason that Americans think it’s very important that you believe in god, irrespective of what ‘god’ names.  I find it extremely uninteresting whether you believe in god or not.  The God I worship is not some deity, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  That makes all the difference in the world for a people that are identified as not just ‘religious America.’  I want Christians to be able to recover that kind of theological integrity.”

“I say the great enemy of Christianity is not atheism, it’s sentimentality.  The deepest sentimentality in our culture is the presumption that we should have children in a manner in which they do not have to suffer for our convictions.”

“What happened on September 11 was murder, and you don’t go to war against a murderer… To say ‘we are at war’ was a comforting claim that gave us a sense that we knew what to do: we had to find someone to kill.  So Afghanistan and Iraq were destined to be wars that we had to fight against the infidel.  If we could say ‘this was murder’ and ‘how do you respond to murderers?’ – it would have required a patience that the American people find very hard to enact.”