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Hauerwas On Hauerwas: Review Of 'Approaching The End: Eschatological Reflections On Church, Politics, And Life', William Portier Sep 2015

Hauerwas On Hauerwas: Review Of 'Approaching The End: Eschatological Reflections On Church, Politics, And Life', William Portier

William L. Portier

Stanley Hauerwas has achieved singular preeminence among theologians in the United States as a public intellectual. Writing on subjects from Christian ethics to law, pacifism, bioethics, and political philosophy, he has provided bountiful fodder for academics while managing to leave footprints in the general culture-he is surely one of very few theologians ever to appear on Oprah. Any new book bearing Hauerwas' name is noteworthy, and the latest one doesn't disappoint.

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Foreword To 'Sermons From Mind And Heart: Struggling To Preach Theologically', Brad Kallenberg, William Trollinger Aug 2015

Foreword To 'Sermons From Mind And Heart: Struggling To Preach Theologically', Brad Kallenberg, William Trollinger

Brad J. Kallenberg

One does not flip through a car manual and mistake it for poetry. Nor does one pick up the Sunday comics and mistake them for a Physicians' Desk Reference. That is because native speakers seldom make mistakes of genre when reading ordinary English texts. Yet pick up a collection of sermons, and one may feel at a loss: What is going on here? What am I to make of these sentences? What sort of genre is this? What am I, as a reader, to expect (or not to expect) from a sermon, especially from a printed sermon? Should I expect …

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The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg Aug 2015

The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Brad J. Kallenberg

Language is like the cane in the hand of the blind person. The better one becomes at getting around with the cane, the more he or she is apt to forget the cane but through the cane perceive the objects scraped and tapped by the other end. A defective cane may distort the world perceived by the blind person. So too, defective use of language threatens to muddy our understanding of the things we talk about. When discussing something as difficult as natural evils, a frequently undetected defect in our language use is “overly attenuated description.” In this piece, I …

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A Member Of No Community? Theology After Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg Aug 2015

A Member Of No Community? Theology After Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg

Brad J. Kallenberg

The study of Wittgenstein has spawned a new sort of Christian theology. A growing list of theologians have discovered in Wittgenstein a therapy for conceptual confusion and tips for how to go on, not only in religious faith and practice, but also in the practice of theology as an academic discipline. This is not to say that such thinkers have succeeded in turning Wittgenstein into an instrument of apologetics or that Wittgenstein has “delivered” them from the grip of their own religious particularity. No; they have learned from Wittgenstein the skill of silence. Their theology, like Wittgenstein’s philosophy, comes to …

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Defending Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg, Terrence Tilley, M. Lysaught Aug 2015

Defending Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg, Terrence Tilley, M. Lysaught

Brad J. Kallenberg

The commentary begins: Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas have long been friends and conversation partners. One would not know that from reading Stout’s “Not of This World” (October 10). Nor does one emerge from Stout’s essay with an accurate sense of Hauerwas’s position. Stout’s presentation is incomplete in many ways. For example, he labels Hauerwas’s ethic as “perfectionist,” implying that it is, in the words of the article’s title, unrealistic or “not of this world.” However, Stout fails to mention Hauerwas’s untiring emphasis on human sinfulness and-most crucially- the subsequent centrality of the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is …

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The Faith And Rationality Of Dalit Christian Experience, Mathew Schmalz Aug 2015