Character and the Christian Life – A Study in Theological Ethics

“Stanley Hauerwas’s important and influential book, Character and the Christian Life, contains a substantial and candid introduction by the author. 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.” —Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame
 

“[T]his is an important book. Christian ethics may or may not adopt Hauerwas’s concept of ‘character,’ but it certainly should take note of his radically different focus. Given the weakness of so much contemporary Christian ethics . . . it is surely significant that there are at last signs that the discipline may be entering fresh territory. If for that reason alone this book deserves to be read widely.” —Scottish Journal of Theology

 

“[A] main road in American Christian ethics. Hauerwas’s own pursuit of the continuities, rather than the discontinuities, of the moral life has taken him several stages further on, so that this welcome reissue enables us to look back over his development. Many of the characteristics of the mature Hauerwas are already evident: the mercurial imagination, the constant struggle for shifts in Gestalt, the involved arguments, the elusive claims, the persistent concern that philosophy and theology should meet.” —Journal of Theological Studies

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at the Divinity School at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has written a voluminous number of articles, authored and edited many books, and has been the subject of other theologians' writing and interest. He has been a board member of the Society of Christian Ethics, Associate Editor of a number of Christian journals and periodicals, and a frequent lecturer at campuses across the country. He is the author of Vision and Virtue and Community of Character and co-author of Christians Among the Virtues, all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

“Stanley Hauerwas’s important and influential book, Character and the Christian Life, contains a substantial and candid introduction by the author. 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.” —Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame

“[T]his is an important book. Christian ethics may or may not adopt Hauerwas’s concept of ‘character,’ but it certainly should take note of his radically different focus. Given the weakness of so much contemporary Christian ethics . . . it is surely significant that there are at last signs that the discipline may be entering fresh territory. If for that reason alone this book deserves to be read widely.” —Scottish Journal of Theology

“[A] main road in American Christian ethics. Hauerwas’s own pursuit of the continuities, rather than the discontinuities, of the moral life has taken him several stages further on, so that this welcome reissue enables us to look back over his development. Many of the characteristics of the mature Hauerwas are already evident: the mercurial imagination, the constant struggle for shifts in Gestalt, the involved arguments, the elusive claims, the persistent concern that philosophy and theology should meet.” —Journal of Theological Studies

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.