Just a few things I managed to note down from a couple of talks ...
"Politics is ... a wisdom-determined activity" (which he seemed to be giving as a reason for being skeptical of liberal political positions -I'll have to think more about that; please comment if you 'get' that statement in that respect).
"Learning the language of the craft [of theology] ... determines how you get to tell the story of the failures of your life."
"I don't believe in spontaneous prayer ... it turns out they're formulas people use again and again"
"Ethics depends on developing the eye of a novellist" (I think this may be actually from Hannah's Child).
"The problem with realism is that it can shut down the imagination." (Amen!).
"We need to learn ... how a priest ... [can] acknowledge their failures and learn ..."
Of these, I find myself continuing to think about two: the spontaneous prayer one and the eye of the novellist one. The latter because what I think it means (and what I think I heard in context) is the idea that ethics does require one to learn to pay attention to the human dynamics and alertness to the pain and human complexity of people and situations. I think that this is true more widely of practical theology.
Stanley Hauerwas
29 August 2010
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Very jealous of you having heard him 'live', but I think I may be able to shed some light on wisdom being opposed to liberal positions thing drawing on some of his writings.
The first thing to bear in mind is that this is likely to be 'liberal' in a US political and theological context, where it is primarily associated with positions determined by a belief in statements about human rights, not in a UK political and theological context where it often has a wider meaning, sometimes meaning little more than a commitment to tolerance and non-hardline positions on things. Now bear in mind that Hauerwas thinks that 'human rights' are a bad idea, because they lock ethics into abstract values and casuistry.
Secondly, then, Hauerwas champions the idea of wisdom as an approach to ethics that is built on character, and formed by placing oneself in a community and with a living tradition based in faithfulness to a narrative. He opposes this to an ethics based on abstract principles of human rights that are divorced from community and narrative and which does not see the need for growth in character.
Thanks Mark. That's very helpful. I'd completely forgotten/missed Hauerwas's skepticism regarding the abstractness of human rights; so the virtue/narrative approach is probably the best alternative from a Christian point of view. I'd realised that his use of 'liberal' was a USAmerican take but I hadn't the context to work out what he was highlighting by using the term which was different to the UK or European approach. So again, thank you. That helps a lot.
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