Bücher von Stanley Hauerwas

How are Christians to live in a violent and wounded world? Rather than contending for privilege by wielding power and authority, we can witness prophetically from a position of weakness. The church has much to learn from an often-overlooked community-those with disabilities. In this fascinating book, theologian Stanley Hauerwas collaborates with Jean Vanier, founder of the worldwide L'Arche communities. For many years, Hauerwas has reflected on the lives of people with disability, the political significance of community, and how the experience of disability addresses the weaknesses and failures of liberal society. And L'Arche provides a unique model of inclusive community that is underpinned by a deep spirituality and theology. Together, Vanier and Hauerwas carefully explore the contours of a countercultural community that embodies a different way of being and witnesses to a new order-one marked by radical forms of gentleness, peacemaking, and faithfulness. The authors' explorations shed light on what it means to be human and how we are to live. The robust voice of Hauerwas and the gentle words of Vanier offer a synergy of ideas that, if listened to carefully, will lead the church to a fresh practicing of peace, love and friendship. This invigorating conversation is for everyday Christians who desire to live faithfully in a world that is violent and broken. This expanded edition now includes a study guide for individual reflection or group discussion...

Stanley Hauerwas presents an overall introduction to the themes and method that have distinguished his vision of Christian ethics. Emphasizing the significance of Jesus' life and teaching in shaping moral life, The Peaceable Kingdom stresses the narrative character of moral rationality and the necessity of a historic community and tradition for morality. Hauerwas systematically develops the importance of character and virtue as elements of decision making and spirituality and stresses nonviolence as critical for shaping our understanding of Christian ethics.

Wilderness Wanderings slashes through the tangled undergrowth that Christianity in America has become to clear a space for those for whom theology still matters. Writing to a generation of Christians that finds itself at once comfortably ?at home? yet oddly fettered and irrelevant in America, Stanley Hauerwas challenges contemporary Christians to reimagine what it might mean to ?break back into Christianity? in a world that is at best semi-Christian. While the myth that America is a Christian nation has long been debunked, a more urgent constructive task remains; namely, discerning what it may mean for Christians approaching the threshold of the twenty-first century to be courageous in their convictions. Ironically, reclaiming the church's identity and mission may require relinquishing its purported ?gains which often amount to little more than a sense of comfort, the seduction of feeling ?at ease in Zion to take up again the risk and adventure of life ?on the way.? Accordingly, this book gives no comfort to the religious right or left, which continues to think Christianity can be made compatible with the sentimentalities of democratic liberalism.Such a re-visioned church will not establish itself through conquest or in a reconstituted Christendom, but rather must develop within its own life the patient, attentive skills of a wayfaring people. At least a church seasoned by a peripatetic life stands a better chance of noticing the changing directions of God's leading. The wilderness, therefore, ought not to appear to contemporary Christians in America as a foreboding and frightening possibility but as an opportunity to rediscover the excitement and spirit, but also the rigorous discipline, of faithful itinerancy. At such a crucial time as this, Hauerwas challenges Christians to eschew the insidious dangers that attend too permanent a habitation in a place called America and to assume instead the holy risks and hazards characteristic of people called out, set apart, and led by God. Wilderness Wanderings is a clarion call for Christians to relinquish the impermanent citizenship of a home that can never be the church's final resting place and confidently take up a course of life the horizons of which are as wide and expansive as the God who promises to lead.The book engages, often quite critically, with major theological and philosophical figures, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Martha Nussbaum, Jeff Stout, Tristram Engelhardt, Iris Murdoch, John Milbank, and Martin Luther King Jr. These interrogations illumine why theology must reclaim its own politics and ethics. Intent on avoiding abstraction, Hauerwas intervenes in current debates around medicine, the culture wars, and race.

""If anything, these prayers are plain. They are so because I discovered I could not pray differently than I speak. In other words, I thought it would be a mistake to try to assume a different identity when I prayed. I figured (Texans ''figure'') that God could take it, because God did not need to be protected. I think I learned this over the years by praying the Psalms in church. God does not want us to come to the altar different from how we live the rest of our lives. Therefore I do not try to be pious or use pious language in these prayers. I try to speak plainly, yet I hope with some eloquence, since nothing is more eloquent than simplicity.""So writes Stanley Hauerwas in the introduction to this collection of prayers, as inimitable as the widely respected (and argued with) theologian himself. Originally prayed in Hauerwas'' divinity school classroom - on a variety of occasions including war, births, Yom Kippur and the death of a beloved cat - they not only display an invigorating faith but demonstrate how late-modern Christians can pray with all the passion, turbulence and life of the ancient psalmists.

Without conforming to Jesus, our colony and our faith will fail.

Narrative Theology is still with us, to the delight of some and to the chagrin of others. 'Why Narrative? is in reprint because it represents what is still a very important question. This diverse collection of essays on narrative theology has proven very useful in university and seminary theology classes. It is also of great use as a primer for the educated layperson or church study group. Jones and Hauerwas have done an excellent job of selecting representative essays that deal with appeals to narrative in areas such as personal identity and human action, biblical hermeneutics, epistemology, and theological and ethical method.

Intended for the clergy as well as academics and students to provide guidance in reading the Bible under the rule of faith, this title aims to recover classical theological commentary for the 21st century. It demonstrates the intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

Synopsis:The crucial challenge for theology is that when it is read the reader thinks, "This is true." Recognizing claims that are "true" enables readers to identify an honest expression of life's complexities. The trick is to show that theological claims--the words that must be used to speak of God--are necessary if the theologian is to speak honestly of the complexities of life. The worst betrayal of the task of theology comes when the theologian fears that the words he or she must use are not necessary.This new collection of essays, lectures, and sermons by Stanley Hauerwas is focused on the central challenge, risk, and difficulty of this necessity--working with words about God. The task of theology is to help us do things with words. "God" is not a word peculiar to theology, but if "God" is a word to be properly used by Christians, the word must be disciplined by Christian practice. It should, therefore, not be surprising that, like any word, we must learn how to say "God."Endorsements:"The essays and sermons in Working with Words reveal that the vibrancy of Stanley Hauerwas arises from his single-minded, manic determination to learn from Jesus and the Scriptures to see and speak as a Christian, and to teach other Christians to do the same."--Peter J. LeithartNew St. Andrews Collegeauthor of Defending Constantine"Working with Words displays more clearly than ever before the basso ostinato that is Wittgenstein's imprint on the Hauerwasian dialect . . . This is vintage Hauerwas."--Jennifer A. HerdtProfessor of Christian Ethics, Yale University "Whether preaching or teaching, writing or conversing, Stanley Hauerwas serves the Word with words--careful words, bold words, nuanced words, provocative words. . . . Reading Working with Words is its own reward, as are the insights one receives upon its completion."--Michael L. Buddeauthor of The Borders of Baptism: Identities, Allegiances, and the Church (forthcoming in the Theopolitical Visions series of Cascade Books). "Thanks be to God that we are blessed with a God who loves us enough to say something substantial to us. And thanks for Stanley Hauerwas who is able to say so well what God says."--William H. WillimonBishop, The United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama Area"Stanley Hauerwas is a word provocateur-but always in service to the Word that is our life and our hope."--Debra Dean Murphyauthor of Teaching That Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education"They range wide and deep, offering both priestly affirmation and prophetic critique. Writing as always in his distinctively Christian voice, Hauerwas helps his audience to cease mumbling and fumbling about the Gospel and the Church. Indeed, he leaves us without excuse for speaking anything other than Christian."--Ralph C. WoodUniversity Professor of Theology and LiteratureBaylor UniversityAuthor Biography:Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. Publishers Weekly named his memoir, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir, one of the Best Religion Titles of 2010.

How does biotechnology touch on human destiny? What are its promises and challenges? In search for a response, the present volume turns to the thought of Hans Jonas, one of the pioneers and founding fathers of bioethics. The continued relevance of his ideas is exemplified by the way Jurgen Habermas applies them to the current debate. The chief promise of biotechnology is to increase our freedom by overcoming the limits of the human condition. The main risk of biotechnology, as both Jonas and Habermas see it, is to diminish or outright abolish our capacity for responsibility and morality. It is argued that the greater freedom is not simply freedom from constraints but freedom for our destiny: the freedom to be the benevolent, responsible, and spontaneous authors of our lives, capable of communion and love. The touchstone for evaluating any biotechnological procedure has to be this greater freedom.

Stanley Hauerwas begins this volume with a vigorous response to the charge of sectarianism leveled against his work by James Gustafson, among others. "Show me where I am wrong about God, Jesus, the limits of liberalism, the nature of the virtues, or the doctrine of the church," Hauerwas replies to his critics, "but do not shortcut that task by calling me a sectarian."The essays that follow explore in a lucid, compelling, firm, and provocative way the church's nature, message, and ministry in the world. Hauerwas writes on the church as God's new language, on clerical character, on the pastor as prophet, on the ministry of the local congregation, on grace and public virtue, and on the relation of church and university.Underlying Hauerwas's argument is his conviction that "the most important knowledge Christian convictions involve, and there is much worth knowing for which Christians have no special claim, requires a transformation of the self. Christianity is no 'world view,' not a form of primitive metaphysics, that can be assessed in comparison to alternative 'world views.' Rather, Christians are people who remain convinced that the truthfulness of their beliefs must be demonstrated in their lives. There is a sense in which Christian convictions are self-referential, but the reference is not to propositions but to lives."

This work slashes through the tangled undergrowth which Christianity in America has become, to clear a space for those to whom theology still matters. The author engages, often critically, with the thought of major theological and philosophical figures such as Martin Luther King.

These twelve sermons by renowned author and pastor William Willimon, with responses by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, demonstrate the fruitfulness and difficulty of the interaction between theologians and practicing pastors. In this book, the authors suggest an intriguing way to think about theological work within the church. In this intriguing...

A Hauerwas "reader", this book is aimed at undergraduate students of ethics. The author characterizes non-violence as the cornerstone of Christian ethics.

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. He challenges the dominant assumption of contemporary Christian social ethics that there is a special relation between Christianity and some form of liberal democratic social system.

Describing Hauerwas' work as Christian ethics, one can allow that phrase its full scope of meaning. It is the work of an ethician, who is thoroughly conversant with that branch of philosophy and comes to grips with its major issues.

Some fourteen years after its initial publication, this important and influential book, with a new, substantial, and candid introduction by the author, is available in a reasonably priced paperback edition. In this volume Hauerwas assesses recent interest in the "ethics of character" and suggests areas in his own work that now call for some corrective and/or further work.

Stanley Hauerwas presents an overall introduction to the themes and method that have distinguished his vision of Christian ethics. Emphasizing the significance of Jesus' life and teaching in shaping moral life, The Peaceable Kingdom stresses the narrative character of moral rationality and the necessity of a historic community and tradition for morality. Hauerwas systematically develops the importance of character and virtue as elements of decision making and spirituality and stresses nonviolence as critical for shaping our understanding of Christian ethics.

This work investigates the distinctiveness of virtues as illuminated by Christian practise using a discussion of Aristotle's ethics with contemporary scholars. It contrasts non-Christian accounts of virtue with Christian accounts of key virtues, including obedience, hope, courage, and patience.

Telling the story of the author's journey into Christian discipleship, this title describes his intellectual struggles with faith, how he has dealt with the reality of marriage to a mentally ill partner, and the gift of friendships that have influenced his character.

By exposing a different account of politics-the church as polis and "e;counterstory"e; to the world's politics-Stanley Hauerwas helps Christians to recognize the unifying beliefs and practices that make them a political entity apart from the rest of the world.

Against the Nations is Stanley Hauerwas's most wide-ranging and sustained effort to develop a uniquely Christian ethic. The book moves from such general themes as "e;Keeping Theological Ethics Theological"e; and "e;Keeping Theological Ethics Imaginative"e; to the application of these themes to such diverse topics as the Holocaust, Jonestown, the reality of the Kingdom, the reality of the Church, the democratic state, nuclear war, and disarmament.