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.
When Character and the Christian Life first appeared in 1975, it was the most important theological contribution to moral debate to appear for many years. Hauerwas followed Catholic moral theology in making the theory of the virtues a topic for argument between secular and Christian moralities; but he linked that theory to a distinctively Protestant view of Gods relationship to human beings. And he did this in a way that might have been thought to challenge equally Catholic and Calvinist views of morality, let alone the impoverished and narcissistic perspectives of theological liberalism. Alasdair MacIntyre, author of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
[A] main road in American Christian ethics. Hauerwass 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
[T]his is an important book. Christian ethics may or may not adopt Hauerwass 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
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. 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.