He Is Stanley Hauerwas
Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (2010) $24.99
Reviewed by Jack Downey
Stanley Hauerwas finds himself in a terrible predicament: he’s a famous American theologian. Perhaps the most famous American theologian. This may or may not mean he’s actually famous by conventional standards, but he seems plenty concerned. He has made himself a very fine career as an iconoclastic ethicist, condemning assimilationist Christianity, academic “respectability,” the military, ill treatment of the differently-abled, and any number of other contemporary issues where Christian mediocrity is laid bare. He has done this largely as a tenured faculty member of the University of Notre Dame and, most recently, Duke Divinity School (with a joint appointment at Duke Law). In 2001, this self-proclaimed institutional “outsider” was anointed “America’s best theologian” by Time magazine. What’s more, he has become an adjective – the benchmark of the bona fide “public intellectual,” a category that Hauerwas disdains. For all his Hauerwasian jeremiads, this “Christian contrarian” has developed a very “respectable” life. Along the way, he has acquired a devoted, often impressively credentialed, and sometimes annoyingly obsessive, personality cult, as well as a laundry list of theological and administrative enemies. Churchill might well have described him as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Or, he’s a hypocritical narcissist. He might acknowledge that he is both, but most likely he would prefer to respond simply that he is a Christian. He is “Stanley Hauerwas,” and Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir wrestles with the stark fact that his name itself carries hefty intellectual baggage, and what that means for Hauerwas the Christian disciple.
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