Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence

Folksy eclectic disarmingly humble and astonishingly wide-ranging Hauerwas offers us a provocative reading of Bonhoeffer that not surprisingly assimilates him closely to John Howard Yoder. At the same time Hauerwas replies to recent criticisms of his work by Jeffrey Stout. Contending that truth depends on performance far more than on theory Hauerwas steps forward as a pacifist gadfly for a more truly faithful church and a more recognizably democratic society. --George Hunsinger Princeton Theological Seminary This book shows how lively and fecund Hauerwass thought remains. A dazzling performance capable of entertaining and instructing professional theologians as much as those who think the world might be a better place without theologians in it. --Paul J. Griffiths University of Illinois at Chicago Stan Hauerwas has done it again! He is able skillfully to blend into his book the passion for truth and justice of two of his greatest influences Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder. He takes these heroic advocates for peace into his own present-day struggle for the soul of the American nation. Hauerwas an admirable Christian pacifist himself dares Christians to be the Jesus people they claim to be and to follow Jesus into the gospel path of nonviolence. --Geffrey B. Kelly author of Liberating Faith: Bonhoeffers Message for Today Never totally predictable. Always a fresh perspective. And yet once again in these essays--on narrative politics Bonhoeffer and the church--we hear the engaging discerning and brilliant voice we have come to know as Stanley Hauerwas. --Mark Thiessen Nation Eastern Mennonite Seminary Contending with and learning from the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose life is often thought to provide a Christian alternative to pacifism Hauerwas deepens the account of Christian nonviolence he has been articulating for decades. His theology is strengthened and clarified by his encounter with the exemplary figure of Bonhoeffer. --Alan Jacobs Wheaton College Without loss of the provocative edge that has made him a vital and distinctive Christian voice Hauerwass Performing the Faith allows him to cast a retrospective eye on his work. At the same time in a brilliant essay under the title of the book he develops a profoundly important description of faithfulness. --Dennis OBrien University of Rochester Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School Duke University.