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Product Description
God knows it is hard to make God boring, Stanley Hauerwas writes, but American Christians, aided and abetted by theologians, have accomplished that feat. Whatever might be said about Hauerwas—and there is plenty—no one has ever accused him of being boring, and in this book he delivers another jolt to all those who think that Christian theology is a matter of indifference to our secular society.
At once Christian theology and social criticism, this book aims to show that the two cannot be separated. In this spirit, Hauerwas mounts a forceful attack on current sentimentalities about the significance of democracy, the importance of the family, and compassion, which appears here as a literally fatal virtue. In this time of the decline of religious knowledge, when knowing a little about a religion tends to do more harm than good, Hauerwas offers direction to those who would make Christian discourse both useful and truthful. Animated by a deep commitment, his essays exhibit the difference that Christian theology can make in the shaping of lives and the world.
Amazon.com Review
"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
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