Stanley Hauerwas

Iam a Texan. We Texans believe you can’t understand us unless you have grown up as we have on Friday-night football and been saved in a tent revival. Growing up in Texas, I assumed that the world was made up of Jews, gentiles, and Texans. There were people “out there” called “Yankees,” . . . . Continue Reading »

The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a . . . . Continue Reading »

American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile by Richard John Neuhaus Basic, 265 pages, $26.95 Near the end of American Babylon comes a paragraph that reads: “The truth about life is that we die. We understandably protest the finality of that truth. We do not go gentle into that night that . . . . Continue Reading »

Few dispute that Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most important philosophers of our time. That reputation, however, does him little good. It is as though, quite apart from the man, there exists a figure called Alasdair MacIntyre whose position you know whether or not you have read him—and whose . . . . Continue Reading »

Stanley Hauwerwas and Paul J. Griffiths Jean Bethke Elshtain is rightly admired for her courage, for her trenchant critiques of peculiarly American pathologies, and for the wisdom of her political judgment. We think, however, that her current attempt morally to justify the Bush presidency’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The 1978 Festival Quarterly featured a profile of John Howard Yoder. The interviewer asked John if he enjoyed his significance. “Oh, time has passed me by,” he responded. (The questioner noted he said this “without feeling.”) “I won’t strategize making sure I get my . . . . Continue Reading »

I am just postmodern enough not to trust “postmodern” as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods. Just as modernity created the . . . . Continue Reading »

Richard John Neuhaus In October 1993, Pope John Paul II issued his tenth encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). The tabloids blazoned that the Pope is clamping down on sexual ethics. And yes, it turns out that he hasn't changed his mind on fornication and adultery, but . . . . Continue Reading »

The Good Societyby Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen,William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. TiptonKnopf, 333 pages, $25 The Good Society is a sequel to these authors’ celebrated book, Habits of the Heart. Habits was a cultural event—an “academic” book that became . . . . Continue Reading »

January 30, 1991 Dear Richard, Your column in the Wall Street Journal (January 23, 1991), “Just War and This War,” came just in time for me. I have been thinking hard, as you can imagine, about what a pacifist does in war. The article—well done as usual—has provoked me to . . . . Continue Reading »