Stanley Hauerwas: Dispatches from the Front. Theological Engagements with the Secular.

This is a book that is pretty much about Hauerwas positioning himself in relation to various other scholars and theologians, to institutions like the Church and the University (the excellent introduction) and to intellectual movements like communitarianism and just war-theory. Some of the best articles can also be found in the Reader, like the superb ”Why Thruthfullness Requires Forgiveness” and the clever ”Why Gays (as a Group) Are Superior to Christians (as a Group)”.

This book contains some of Hauerwas best engagements with literature, especially his beloved Trollope, who is treated in two articles; and there are articles on several of Hauerwas ”usual” topics: war, medicine, the mentally handicapped. Hauerwas here discusses with Taylor, Stringfellow as well as Barth.

I’d say this book is useful, apart for those who look for a particular chapter, for those that want to be able to place Hauerwas better, otherwise, it is not a book that stands out in Hauerwas’s production.

Contents:

1. Constancy and Forgiveness: The Novel as a School for Virtue
2. On Honor: By Way of a Comparison of Karl Barth and Trollope
3. Why Truthfullness Requires Forgiveness: A Commencement Address for Graduates of a Collage of the Church of the Second Chance
4. The Democratic Policing of Christianity
5. Creation as Apocalyptic: A Tribute to William Stringfellow with Jeff Powell
6. Can a Pacifist Think About War?
7. Whose ”Just” War Which Peace?
8. Why Gays (as a Group) Are Superior to Christians (as a Group)
9. Communitarians and Medical Ethicists: Or ”Why I Am None of the Above”
10. Killing Compassion
11. The Church and the Mentally Handicapped: A Continuing Challange to the Imagination

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