A Peaceable Kingdom is unlike most of Stan's other books: This is a full-length treatment of Hauerwas' understanding of "Christian ethics". It's not a "primer" in the traditional sense. There's no survey of the various ethical options Christians might make. Instead, in inimical Stanley style, what readers are given is no less than a theological primer in "Hauerwasian" ways of thinking, if there is such a thing.
What struck me most forcefully, when I first read this book in college, was undoubtedly Hauerwas' central contention which is that ethics, not to mention every part of Christian life and discipleship, can only fruitfully be understood through the narrative of our history as a people of God. He begins with the claim that every ethic must include a qualifier, including and perhaps especially, "Christian ethics". He raises the contention against the backdrop of a systemic view that there is somehow a "universal ethic" from which we can derive our complete moral code. Apart from the problems with this latter view, it quickly becomes clear that as Hauerwas sees it, there is no clearer way to develop an ethical standpoint but through narrative -- through the history that is tied up in the qualifier "Christian".
Thus the question becomes, not "what I ought to do?" but "what sort of person ought I to be?" We become the people that we are through the stories that we tell and the histories that we appropriate.
That was the most forceful point, for me, and it was a welcome note of challenge especially to legalistic evangelical approaches to morality. The chapter that most captivated me was his chapter on Jesus in the middle of the book, describing Jesus as the presence of the peaceable kingdom itself. The following chapter on the church -- "the servant community" -- was similarly wonderful, and brought some of the abstract themes he had been dealing with into wonderful clarity.