The Little Friar

We've come on a journey -- after 99 book recommendations -- to my very last recommendation:  Hauerwas & Vanier's Living Gently in a Violent World:  The Prophetic Witness of Weakness . The book is very short. It has only four chapters, book ended by an introduction and conclusion authored by John Swinton. (The expanded 2018 edition also includes a study guide, with chapter by chapter questions for review.) Two of the chapters were authored by Vanier and two by Hauerwas. Vanier's chapters deal with practical and personal accounts of life within L'Arche. These accounts, though theologically muddled, demonstrate Vanier's real and significant concern for the citizens of our world least likely to be valued. The vision he provides of people with cognitive disabilities being treated as humans, with personalities and flaws like the rest of us, is compelling. Instead of hiding the mentally disabled from view and treating them like patients, L'Arche communities inv...

It's hard for me to believe that the brouhaha over Roy Moore's display of the 10 commandments in his courtroom is now 15 years ago.  But the American culture wars are still nothing if not fought over the importance of the 10 commandments in American society.  Some feel these 10 "rules", abstracted from the rest of the Christian narrative, can serve as an adequate guide to all things moral. Hauerwas and Willimon's account of the 10 commandments in The Truth about God challenge that belief.  The 10 commandments have a lot to say about the people who observe them, they claim.  But they also have even more to say about the God who claims those people.  They are not some set of universal rules -- they simply offer ways for a certain people to know a certain God -- our God who delivers from the bondage of political and economic bondage.  Whose deliverance then makes claims on how we structure our political and economic and social lives.  God cares how w...

Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics is a collection of essays that Hauerwas and Pinches put together to challenge the rise of "virtue ethics" that became popular in the 80s and 90s.  I remember, as a student in Hauerwas' "Theological Ethics" seminar, hearing so many of the ideas put forward here, and found the book after its publication to be an influential defense of the distinctive ways in which Christian faith articulates "virtue".  The book is divided into three sections. The first section consists of three chapters of "theological reflections on Aristotelian themes".  The next section responds to contemporary exponents of virtue:  Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and John Casey.  The final section, which the authors consider most crucial to their case, is devoted to examining particular Christian virtues. It's this final section of the book that I think poses some of the mos...

War and the American Difference is a book which offers some of Hauerwas' most developed discussion of war and violence, especially in the context of America.  The first section demonstrates how closely war is embedded in American history, experience and identity.  The second section includes his appeal (co-written with Enda McDonagh) and reflections to abolish war, a discussion of sacrifice in the context of war, and essays on CS Lewis and Martin Luther King.  The final section explores the role of the church in terms of justice (comparing Daniel Bell and Nicholas Wolterstoff), Pentecost as a language of peace, the common good, the future of parish ministry (be interesting to see some Baptist reflections on this) and mission (this paper includes a response to Nathan Kerr's criticisms of Hauerwas' ecclesiology). The book hangs together much better than so many of Hauerwas' other essay collections, making it perhaps one of the most accessible for Hauerwas' thou...

American Christians are a people of hope. But according to Hauerwas, they're inclined to misplace it. They look for salvation in capitalism, in democracy, in postmodernity and in their practical progeny:  Modern medicine, seeker-sensitive worship and "ethics" (divorced from theology). This little volume offers some of Hauerwas' most positive arguments in favor of the church that offers a better hope and provides resources to resist the idolatrous assumptions that underlie these Enlightenment-bred systems of thought and action. Written in his classic style -- sweeping, engaging and provocative -- this book does not necessarily break any new ground, but Hauerwas is typically unapologetic about that. ("Given the entrenchment of the position against which I am arguing, I can only say again what I have said before in the hope of establishing new habits.")  Since this is a collection of essays written at other times for other purposes, no easil...

Hauerwas' Unleashing the Scripture was released in 1995, my first year at Duke.  It made its appearance in my life like Barth's Romerbrief appeared to European theologians:  Like a bomb on my theological playground.  I had already read quite a bit of Hauerwas' work, and went to Duke partly because Stan was there (though, to be honest, it was really Fred Herzog who got me there).  The book begins with an alarming sentence:  "No task is more important than the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America".  Stan proceeds to lay out how the Church has lost its Scripture to an over-reliance upon either the historical-critical method or literal approaches.  These methods assert -- as did nearly all my education to that point -- that if you just had the proper training and the "common sense" that goes with it, you could understand and find meaning in the biblical text. In contrast, Hauerwas insists that without th...

A Community of Character was perhaps Hauerwas' most important collection of occasional essays.   The opening sentences of the "Introduction" reveal that his one concern is "to reassert the social significance of the church as a distinct society with an integrity peculiar to itself" (p. 1).  Indeed, the compelling characteristic of Hauerwas' ethic is its commitment to the particular narrative of Christian history as revealed and experienced in the church community.  However, I think we miss the fullness of the argument if we just focus on the community level of the Christian narrative.  What is needed is an understanding of the foundational beliefs that support that community; Hauerwas would agree, writing, "I contend that the only reason for being Christian ... is because Christian convictions are true; and the only reason for participation in the church is that it is the community that pledges to form its life by that truth" (p. 1).   With t...

Vision and Virtue was Hauerwas' first book.  Published over 40 years ago now, its opening words still capture so much of what Hauerwas has had to say in those 40 years: I have brought these essays together in the hope that they will prove to be useful for classes in Christian ethics. These essays develop a perspective that has been sadly lacking in much of recent Christian ethics. I wish, however, to make no exaggerated claims for the importance of this book as it is incomplete in many ways. The essays are placed under three headings:  "Theoretical and Methodological Issues", "The New Morality and Normative Ethics", and "Vision and Society".  Under the first heading Hauerwas discusses themes like "vision" (this is the Murdoch phase), ethics of "character", and the narrative notion of the self, further developed later on in his writings. The second heading treats themes like abortion and euthanasia, as well as the c...

I imagine readers will be surprised that Hauerwas and Willimon's Resident Aliens doesn't make an appearance on my list, or that I neglect mentioning Hauerwas' recent theological memoir, Hannah's Child , but both those -- while demanding in their own right -- really don't get at Hauerwas' important contributions for theology the way A Peaceable Kingdom:  A Primer in Christian Ethics is able to do.  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' ...

Readers to my blog will know that not only did I study at Duke Divinity, but my thesis was written with Hauerwas as a reader.  Stan, for those readers who don't know, is a provocative, prolific Christian ethicist whose dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles range over a variety of topics.  Most of his published work is in the form of the occasional essay, in which he tries to argue for and display a new language for the church and for Christian ethics.  The ad hoc character of much of his work is indicative of his view that theology is an ongoing practice of the Church, explicating what the Church thinks and does, and is thus of a piece with the messiness of actual ecclesial life. By contrast, a desire for comprehensiveness is the legacy of a Christian ethics that mistakenly thinks itself responsible for American society.  The nature of Hauerwas' project and the volume of his work make the "reader" format especially welcome. That's why...