Feature

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon sparked a lively debate about church, ministry, and identity. How does their book read 25 years later?

Like Willimon and Hauerwas, Donald MacKinnon began with Philippians 2.

We gather that some of our readers still don't want to talk Christology with us. But it's because of Jesus that the church has trouble in the world.

Resident Aliens, a work of theology, was put to use as applied sociology. The description of life in the Christian colony became, paradoxically, a formula for success.

We need the spiritual agility to recognize counter-hegemonic "citizenship in heaven" whenever and however it becomes flesh.

Resident Aliens helped convince a generation that there is no Christian identity apart from the church. But where exactly is Hauerwas and Willimon's "adventuresome" church?

People are rightly disgusted by buildings with separate entrances for low-income residents. But churches have side-door people, too.

A funny thing happened on the way to the church-as-polis: I can now imagine being a resident alien and invested in the state, in all of its glorious failing.

"We are not afraid today," we sang as we walked. I turned to the person next to me and whispered, "That's a lie."

I once actually was a resident alien. I wonder if Hauerwas and Willimon have any clue what it means to occupy that space.

Denigrating "social activist churches" was central to Hauerwas and Willimon's agenda. Yet Resident Aliens revived social gospel arguments.

The image of a resident alien offers an important biblical corrective. But it isn't the only such image we need.

It is disingenuous to deem ourselves alien to a culture and society we benefit from—a culture and society we created.

I understand Resident Aliens as a response to the sort of civil religion that makes people worse than they would be otherwise.

Resident Aliens affirmed the strange way we Americans deal with our racial history and its current realities by indirection, innuendo, and avoidance.

I've spent the last few months in guilty inactivity. I've discovered that the world doesn't seem to need me to improve it.

In mainline churches, "mission" is both buzzword and expletive. Into this circle of American anxiety comes a gentle rebuke from the Tamils.

For Andrew Elphinstone, human selfishness and violence are not evidence of a world gone wrong. They show a person ripe for transformation.

In the context of a seminary class behind bars, Jesus' question to Simon is a probing and challenging one.

"Church of Pakistan college principal beaten," read the headline. I am that principal.