From Amazon.com
"The study of rocks by geologists is legitimate, but God just does not seem to be an appropriate subject to constitute a respectable discipline in the contemporary university. Which creates a wonderful opportunity for those of us who remain theologians. Since we are never going to make it as academics, or anything else, we might as well have fun," writes Stanley Hauerwas, in the introduction to this terrifically fun book. A few hours with Hauerwas, a professor of Theological Ethics at Duke, will give you bigger jolts than a month's worth of electroshock therapy. Regardless of your theological prejudices, he'll show you the beams in your eyes, then show you how to see through them.
Dispatches from the Front collects some of his best essays (such as "Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)" and "Constancy and Forgiveness: The Novel as a School for Virtue"), in a useful, accessible, and defiantly unboring book.
--Michael Joseph Gross
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
These seemingly disparate essays are united by Hauerwas' concern for "the actual practices of forgiveness and reconciliation and how and why they require a community that is eschatologically shaped." If that quotation is quite a mouthful, well, Hauerwas is an academic theologian, member of a tribe not known for easy prose. Nevertheless, broadly schooled Christians and others may be enthralled by his discriminating considerations of the virtues of the gentleman in the novels of Anthony Trollope; of the relationship between forgiveness and truthfulness as exemplified in Anne Tyler's
Saint Maybe; of the problems of the coexistence of Christianity and liberal democracy; of nonviolence as not a theory about the ethics of war but the polity of Christianity; of the moral superiority, re military service, of gays as a group compared with Christians as a group; and of how compassion as a liberal virtue paradoxically perpetrates cruelty. Persistent throughout the book are deep skepticism about the compatibility of Christianity and liberalism, also Hauerwas' particular fanaticism: "I want . . . to convince everyone who calls himself or herself a Christian that being a Christian means that one must be nonviolent." Challenging, sometimes difficult reading, animated by saving grace.
Ray Olson
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
