Stanley HauerwasRezensionen

"The society we in the West inhabit is a strange place. We are oddly comfortable with truths that, on reflection, are deeply dissonant and even disturbing. For example, we seem quite comfortable with the knowledge that up to twenty thousand children die every day from preventable diseases. We miss the deep irony that we constantly seek peace by going to war. We develop policies and practices that welcome people with disabilities into our communities, offering them rights and responsibilities, and at precisely the same time we develop forms of genetic technology designed to prevent them from entering society in the first place." p 11 (from Introduction by John Swinton)

Because of the title of the book, I thought it was going to be more about physical violence (war, death penalty, etc.), but actually it's more about philosophical "violence" and equates slowing down and having patience with "peace."

It speaks mostly to the ways in which we either embrace or reject individuals with disabilities in our everyday lives.

It was an okay read, but too abstract/philosophical for my taste or understanding.

It is written by 3 authors, essentially: John Swinton writes the introduction and conclusion, while Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas each write two chapters. This made the flow a little strange, because each one has a different voice.

I was concerned especially with Jean Vanier's theological views. He states at one point, "Catholics and Protestants, Hindus and Muslims.... they are all our brothers and sisters." (p 28) I didn't think he did a very great job distinguishing how humans are made in God's image, and yet not all humans have turned from sin and joined the family of God.

It had some good points, but I'm betting there's a better book somewhere on this same subject, especially since this one was published a decade ago.

One last quote I liked:

".... speed has produced technology, which then undercuts the viability of community. We see it in medicine today; the task is not to care for patients but to cure them. When caring turns into curing, we don't know what to do with patients when we can't cure them. What do we do with people who have diseases it seems they won't recover from? That's speed taking over." (p 50)

NT ethics in context

theological engagements with secular

20th cent theology & philosophy

A quick, eye-opening look into the Christian witness from the perspective of "weakness" - primarily through L'Arche, an organization that serves the disabled community.

Only downside: the last chapter seems out of place with its tone and subject matter, though its discussion is relevant.

Highly recommended.

Love the idea implied by the title more than the words inside. Vanier’s chapters were stronger. Hauerwas was not his strongest, I thought. His ideas were poorly structured and unclear. The theme of gentleness was his to stitch and it never came together for me.

That being said, still a fragrant reminder of the richness of weakness, humility, community, and peace.

The fundamental principle of peace is a belief that each person is important (Jean Vanier)

I read this as I held my sick little 9 month old son. For a theologian's memior, I don't think you can ask for much better. I think I was disappointed with how little I disagreed with Hauerwas. His vulnerable honesty was endearing. Hopefully I can come back and share some of the many quotes I appreciated.

Although fairly dense in their writing style, Willimon and Hauerwas provide an important and insightful critique of church in America today.

"The challenge facing today's Christian is... to form a community, a colony of resident aliens" that knows and embodies the love of our trinitarian God (171). "The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment. (172)" In short, they argue that the church embodies more of the values of contemporary culture than the values of Jesus and God's kingdom. We must form counter-cultural alien colonies wherever the church is located.

This is not an introduction to themes, theories or writers in ethics but covers most important areas. Probably the most accessible and stimulating account of what a specifically Christian ethic may look like. His work can best be explored further through the selections in The Hauerwas Reader. Originally published in 1984 this new edition includes Afterword by Hauerwas 20 years on. The best summary of Hauerwas' critique of natural law I know can be found at pp. 51-64.

A collection of articles by Hauerwas which gives an excellent introduction to his thought. Hauerwas is a very important contemporary Christian ethicist particularly associated with narrative and virtue ethics and with Anabaptist leanings

A stimulating and original collection of articles structured around the pattern of eucharistic worship and reflecting Hauerwas' own approach in many areas. This second edition updates articles and adds to (in some cases replacing) those in the first 2008 edition.

3.5 stars. Hauerwas is not a great preacher, but he is often a good one, and sometimes very good. These are dense, theological sermons, but they are often not deeply exegetical, which is unfortunate to this reader. For instance, one repeated tic he has is to make a jump to the Eucharist (much as many evangelical preachers make a jump to the Cross) without really doing the work of laying a path from the text. This is likely a function of seeing the sermon as one whole with the liturgy moving toward the Table, but others make these connections better. This is best read for people who want to read Hauerwasian theology, not for people who are looking for a great book of sermons.

Leading theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas shows how discussions of Christology and the authority of scripture involve questions about what kind of community the church must be to rightly tell the stories of God.

Summary: Essays by the two authors reflecting on the practice of gentleness in the L'Arche communities where assistants and the disabled live in community, and the theological and political significance of this witness in a violent world.

Stanley Hauerwas has been named "America's best theologian" by Time magazine, known for his advocacy that the church embody its social ethic, that it be itself, in its communal life, and for his critique of liberal democracy, capitalism, and militarism, and the church's often unthinking endorsement and adoption of these ideologies. Jean Vanier, deceased in 2019, was the founder of L'Arche, a network of communities where helpers and the disabled live and share life together in "houses" or communities. Until 2006, they had never met, although Hauerwas had commended the work of L'Arche. They were invited to a conference by the Center for Spirituality, Health, and Disability at the University of Aberdeen, where they spent two days conversing and speaking. This book, recently reissued in an expanded edition with study guide, reflects those conversations.

Other than introductory and concluding essays by John Swinton, this book consists of four alternating essays by Vanier and Hauerwas. The first, by Vanier is a narrative of the beginnings and development of L'Arche. Drawn by the work of Father Thomas Philippe with the disabled in France, he moved there, began to live with two disabled men who had been institutionalized, and soon found himself leading the community. He describes L'Arche as fragile, subject to government regulations and the question of whether people will always choose to live with them. He also describes L'Arche as a place of transformation, both for assistants and the disabled, transformations that reflect the mystery of the Spirit's work. He describes three crucial activities in their community, all requiring gentleness and patience: meals together, prayer and communion, and celebration of everything from birthdays and holidays to deaths of members. The message in all of this is, "You are a gift. You're a gift to the community."

Hauerwas responds by discussing how L'Arche is a "modest proposal" in a violent world that is a witness to the church of its call to gentleness and non-violence. It is a witness of care for those who cannot be cured, of patience in a particular place. For this reason, Hauerwas also believes that L'Arche needs the church as a reminder that they need to worship with the larger body that is not L'Arche. It is not only as a witness to the church, amplified through the church, but also support and sustenance from the church that makes its life possible.

Vanier then writes of L'Arche as a place that in a small way addresses the woundedness of the world by recognizing in weakness and wounds a way to God. He speaks of the connection of fear and violence, and the power of surrendering our fears to love--the love of God and the present love of the community, both the abled and the disabled. Grieving the sentiment that would abort all those with Down syndrome and the message that leaves the disabled feeling, "I am no good" Vanier writes:

"The heart of L'Arche is to say to people, 'I am glad you exist.' And the proof that we are glad that they exist is that we stay with them for a long time. We are together, we can have fun together. 'I am glad you exist' is translated into physical presence" (p. 69).

Hauerwas's concluding essay explores the politics of gentleness in an extended engagement with the thought of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, both who labored to articulate a rationale for the rights of the disabled to help. He summarizes how L'Arche went beyond this:

"Nussbaum wants to give Jean justifications for helping the disabled. What she can't do is give him a reason to live with them. But that is exactly what Jean says he needed. He had to be taught how to be gentle. It is not easy to learn to be gentle with the mentally disabled. As Jean has already said, they also suffer from the wound of loneliness. They can ask for too much. Which means gentleness requires the slow and patient work necessary to create trust. Crucial for the development of trust is that assistants in L'Arche discover the darkness, brokenness, and selfishness shaped by their own loneliness.... According to Jean, through the struggle to discover we are wounded like the mentally disabled, we discover how much 'we need Jesus and his Paraclete..." (p. 90).

There is a gentleness that flows out of this awareness before God of our mutual weakness, exemplified in the practice of mutually washing one another's feet, transformative to assistants and disabled alike, that is a witness in a violent world.

This slim volume is an extraordinary testament, a witness as it were, to the power of gentleness that flows from weakness, both in its description of the quiet wonder taking place within L'Arche, and the record of the conversation between Vanier and Hauerwas, as they opened minds and hearts to each other to explore the significance of the "modest proposal" that is L'Arche in an impatient and violent world.

Very insightful, with a meditative quality and tone appropriate to the subject of the book and to Lent. I highly recommend it, especially as a Lent/Holy Week devotional. Hauerwas approaches Christ with a reverence, fondness, and sense of otherness that illuminates the seven last words. Most provocatively, he gives a drastically different interpretation of some of the words than that which would seem most natural to us 20 centuries, half a world, and two languages removed.

We often think of Christian ethics in response to a concrete problem. Did that politician abuse his power when he dated that intern? Is it ethical for a rape victim to have an abortion? Is it permissible to lie in order to serve the greater good? Where can we go to find the resources to answer these questions?

Many Christians, especially of evangelical stripe, go to the Bible—Hauerwas goes to church. It's not that Hauerwas doesn't value scripture, but he knows that scripture was written by and formed within the church. Scripture is best read together, within the context of the church. It is in the community of the baptized that believers grow in virtue. It is in the church that Christians learn their place in God's story and have their imaginations freed to think truly and ethically.

The entire book centres around chapter 5, "Jesus: The Presence of the Peaceable Kingdom" (72-95). The story of Jesus (not Christological reflection) is "meant not only to display [Jesus'] life, but to train us to situate our lives in relation to that life" (74). The life of Jesus is characterized by nonviolent love.

"Thus to be like Jesus is to join him in the journey through which we are trained to be a people claiming citizenship in God's kingdom of nonviolent love—a love that would overcome the powers of this world, not through coercion and force, but through the power of this one man's death" (76).

The church embodies an alternate reality—true to reality. The church the place where nonviolent love reigns and thus bears witness to the world that Christ is present. (Or at least it should be thus. Violence and disunity threaten the witness of the church to its core.)

When it's time to make difficult moral and ethical decisions, we will have been apprenticed by the church into the life of Christ and will have become the sort of people capable of making those hard choices.

One of the things that mark's me out as abnormal is that I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of one of my favorite theologians memoirs for the past year. This book will likely not seen as his most important book (that would be the Peacable Kingdom), his most popular book (that would be Resident Aliens), but I found it refreshing to hear Hauerwas in his own words share some of his journey as a theologian and revealing the soil that his ideas came to fruition.

A good book on any aspect of Christian theology is one that brings clarity and new insights into what is believed. An even better Christian book is one that challenges long-held assumptions and forces the reader to rethink concepts and values taken for granted.

This is an even better book.

Many of these essays are challenging in regards our views on aging and care for the aged, especially if we are truly baptized into a community. What does it mean to be a person in our world today, and how does the loss of ability and other losses affect our own views of ourselves as persons? Many many interesting and thought-provoking ideas of aging and the aged.

Quite a disappointing book given the level of fanfare it produced.

It's unfortunate that the arbitrary assumptions Hauerwas and Willimon make about secular Western culture are based such a weak interpretation of our context. They are right about the changing role of the church through the last century and the need for the church to present a real politic for our culture. But instead of theological or scriptural roots for that polis, and while ignoring the Christian development of ideas they don't like, they allow their antipathy for liberal democracy and capitalism to suffice in its stead, meaning they rather unquestioningly do little more than repeat the tired old secular leftist complaints about Western culture which have drifted about for two centuries. For example, their articulation of individualism in the West presents a mere caricature of the philosophical and historical reality of the nuanced ideas in question: ideas clearly rooted in Christian faith and history; ideas which have lead to relative relief from poverty, tyranny and war in the West. Their call for church and clergy to regain their rightful task in truth telling, in a similar fashion, sounds so noble and invigorating until one discovers that the political truth they expect to be told is just nonsense.

Christian communities are indeed aliens in the West, but not for the reasons Hauerwas and Willimon would like us to believe.

This book was all over the place. But in a good way. whether talking about if our church was true followers of Jesus and how they would act, to if we were true followers of Jesus how we would vote.

The book discusses how you don't teach language by teaching the rules first. You teach language by example. So why does the church want to teach people how to be Christians by teaching them the rules first.

This book also had great examples of what true Christian community should look like. Are we serving each other and looking to build each other up, or are we satisfying our own needs and using the community.

This book was all over the place. But in a good way. whether talking about if our church was true followers of Jesus and how they would act, to if we were true followers of Jesus how we would vote.

The book discusses how you don't teach language by teaching the rules first. You teach language by example. So why does the church want to teach people how to be Christians by teaching them the rules first.

This book also had great examples of what true Christian community should look like. Are we serving each other and looking to build each other up, or are we satisfying our own needs and using the community.

This book is actually a series of essays centered around themes, thus the overall structure is somewhat disjointed compared to a book, which is designed around a central topic. That being said the essays were thought-provoking and challenging. This book however is probably not a great choice as a first read in theology. If you've already been exposed to academic theological works though, then you may find this work to be useful.

Self-righteous, self-congratulatory, pompous, and unambitious: This book is a clear example of what is wrong with Seminarians. There are good ideas here (Christianity shouldn't be a slave to tradition or society), but the good ideas are underdeveloped, unsupported, and drowned in a sea of hyperbole.

The authors say things like, "God demands that we sacrifice the lives of our children and those we love to our interpretation of His will!", "Democracy and individual rights are idols!" "Biblical
authority is more important than compassion or kindness!"

I don't buy any of that and I won't endorse it.

Hauerwas is an unlikely theologian. Can you connect the dots between a potty-mouthed bricklayer from Texas who is completely unsure of whether or not he is a Christian to the esteemed professor of Christian Ethics from Notre Dame and Duke Universities? In Hannah's Child, Stanely Hauerwas does just that.

This memoir contains everything that makes an interesting life and compelling story. On the one hand, you have his trademark blunt intelligence. On being notified that he was Time magazine's "best theologian in America" in 2001, he replied, ""Best' is not a theological category" (ix).

On the other hand, he shows us how his life and teaching (including his prolific written output) is punctuated with having to care for his son while living with his mentally ill wife.

If you've read Hauerwas' books, you should read his memoir. It's a blunt, funny, tragic, and hope-ful look at the personal life of one of the "best" theologians around.½