Stanley Hauerwas

Iam a Texan. We Texans believe you can’t understand us unless you have grown up as we have on Friday-night football and been saved in a tent revival. Growing up in Texas, I assumed that the world was made up of Jews, gentiles, and Texans. There were people “out there” called . . . . Continue Reading »

The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a . . . . Continue Reading »

American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile by Richard John Neuhaus Basic, 265 pages, $26.95 Near the end of American Babylon comes a paragraph that reads: “The truth about life is that we die. We understandably protest the finality of that truth. We do not go gentle into that night that . . . . Continue Reading »

Few dispute that Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most important philosophers of our time. That reputation, however, does him little good. It is as though, quite apart from the man, there exists a figure called Alasdair MacIntyre whose position you know whether or not you have read him—and whose . . . . Continue Reading »

In l946, standing amid the ruins of Bonn University, Karl Barth gave the lectures that we now know as Dogmatics in Outline . He lectured without a script, because as he tells us, the “primitive conditions which I met with in Germany made it absolutely necessary for me to ‘talk’ . . . . Continue Reading »

The 1978 Festival Quarterly featured a profile of John Howard Yoder. The interviewer asked John if he enjoyed his significance. “Oh, time has passed me by,” he responded. (The questioner noted he said this “without feeling.”) “I won’t strategize making sure I get my . . . . Continue Reading »

I am just postmodern enough not to trust “postmodern” as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods. Just as modernity created the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Good Society by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. Tipton Knopf, 333 pages, $25 The Good Society is a sequel to these authors’ celebrated book, Habits of the Heart . Habits was a cultural event”an “academic” book that . . . . Continue Reading »

We live in a time when ethics has become big business: medical schools hire medical ethicists, business schools hire business ethicists. Congress has an ethics committee, and schools and universities are supposed to teach values. As a theologian trained in ethics, I suppose I should be happy about . . . . Continue Reading »

(Editor’s Note: This paper was originally given as the tenth Paul Wattson Lecture at the University of San Francisco, sponsored by the Franciscan Society of the Atonement.) I was a Communist for the FBI was the title of a popular book, movie, and television series of the 1950s. In a similar . . . . Continue Reading »