Attempting (again) to blog this from work using my Hotmail account, so here’s hoping it doesn’t mangle the HTML tags (I won’t be able to fix any problems until I get home tonite).
A Theologian for These Times?:
If there is a single ambition running through Hauerwas’s books, essays, sermons, and occasional writings, it is this: to undo the Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world. The church must reclaim the proclamation that scandalized the ancient world, that the “people who bear the cross,” not the sword, are “working with the grain of the universe.” (The phrase is borrowed from the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.) Hauerwas wants to free the American church from its bondage to idolatrous self-constructions—otherwise known as civil religion—and restore to its mission the countercultural practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, hospitality to strangers, and nonviolence, as well as nonresistance to death and suffering brought on by forces of evil.