Modern Theology 28:2 April 2012

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

HANNAHS CHILD: A LIFE GIVEN

AND THEREFORE LIVED
moth_1744

327..338

AARON RICHES
A warrior must know how to carve, ask and sacrifice,
but in measures always.
One gift calls for another.
John Milbank, The Circulation of the Ring
from the sequence The Legend of Death1
A young philosopher from Milan sits before me in Granada. My friendship
with Alessandro (as he is called) is embodied evidence of the impact of
Stanley Hauerwas on the way I do theology. Let me explain. In 2009 Stanley
Hauerwas published a book of sermons titled A Cross-Shattered Church, which
he dedicated to Msgr. Javier Martnez and William Willimon. At the end of
the preface Hauerwas wrote:
The book is dedicated to two bishops. Will Willimon is the Methodist
bishop of North Alabama. Javier Martinez is the Roman Catholic archbishop of Granada, Spain. Will Willimon is an old friend and is one of the
best preachers of our day. Archbishop Martinez is a new friend who
graciously hosted a conference in Granada in September 2005 to explore
the developing theological agenda of John Milbanks and my work. Every
morning began with the archbishop saying mass and preaching. Paula and
I were often moved to tears by Bishop Martinezs sermons as well as his
pain that we could not share the Eucharist. But we could share the Word.2
The Nuevo Inicio meeting in Granada was intended, among other things, to
build new theological friendships as a way to heal the fissures suffered by the
Church in modernity; one attendee dubbed it a new beginning for a nouvelle
thologie politique.3 I did not attend the Nuevo Inicio meeting, nor have I ever
Aaron Riches
Seminario Mayor de Granada, Paseo de la Cartuja, 4918011, Granada, SPAIN
aaronriches@yahoo.ca
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met Stanley Hauerwas, but the shared history of friendship initiated by

Archbishop Martnez in 2005 is a touchstone of my theological journey, one
that began for me two years before at the University of Virginia as a pupil of
John Milbank, and continues now in Granada, as a joint faculty member of the
Instituto de Filosofa Edith Stein and the Instituto de Teologa Lumen
Gentium (institutes founded by Archbishop Martnez and operating within
the Seminario Mayor de Granada). As one of many people who is linked
through the Nuevo Inicio meeting, I have been shaped by Hauerwass
insistence that Christianity is not a set of propositionsbut is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and
give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some
kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you
would perform Lear.4 By reading and talking through Hauerwas in this way
with friends such as Alessandro Rovati (who is, as a result of the Nuevo
Inicio meeting, a friend of Archbishop Martnez and John Milbank and a
current pupil of Stanley Hauerwas) I have encountered Hauerwass emphasis
on the theological how as an ongoing theological dialogue.
Hauerwass insistence on the theological how makes him notoriously
hard to place on the modern political spectrum: he is at once conservative
and radical,5 indeed deeply conservative, but . . . drawn to extreme positions.6 Hauerwas is radical in the sense of the Latin radix, and so he tries
to root his thought as deeply as possible in the embodied practices of a people
called the Church. He is conservative in that he thinks and strives to live
within the inherited tradition and memory of the Church, by which the
Church speaks, performs and is embodied. Ultimately, Hauerwas is a conservative radical because he thinks from a Christological vantage point, one
which I will elaborate below as: (1) understanding Christocentrism as sequela
Christi, (2) thinking Christian politics as eschatology, and (3) holding up
witness as the heart of Christian life.
In the preface to Hannahs Child, Hauerwas writes: I have . . . tried to live
a life I hope is unintelligible if the God we Christians worship does not
exist.7 In the same theological memoir he writes: I am a Christian because
I believe that by so being I have a better chance of living truthfully.8 A
related statement appears in his book In Good Company: I am a theologian
with a theological position that makes no sense unless a church actually exists
that is capable of embodying the practices of perfection.9 This commitment
to the embodied practice of Christianity has resulted in many unlikely
friendships, a phrase that appears throughout Hannahs Child (describing
his relationship to people as diverse as Rowan Greer, Fr Charlie Sheedy CSC
and Alasdair MacIntyre).10 These unlikely friendships provide a significant
clue to the nature of Hauerwass ecclesiology, illustrating the necessity for
him of being bound together in the reception of a common gift. Whereas
secular modernity exalts chosen relationships, the Church gives relationships stranger, more difficult and more beautiful than an individual can ever
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give to himself.11 The communion of the Church is possible, for Hauerwas,

because the Church is a storied people. By contrast, modernity names the
time when a people are produced that believe they have no story, except
the story they chose when they had no story.12 In this context, for Hauerwas,
the perennial temptation for Christians is to presume that going to church
is . . . not at the heart of what it means to be Christian.13 Hence modern
Christians have found it hard to avoid the spiritualization of their faith,14 to
avoid abstracting their faith from the fundamental requirement of the
Church: the shaping of a visible community constituted by material practices that give us ways to go on when we are not sure where we are.15
In light of this modern problematic, Hauerwas once described Karl Marx
and Pope Leo XIII as friends,16 as two conservative radicals challenging
the kind of society being produced by the development of industrial capitalism.17 For Hauerwas, both men saw how the abstractionist impulse of industrial modernity was corrosive to the point of making impossible any form of
community that can sustain a sense of human solidarity.18 Certainly unlikely
friends, Hauerwass intention in naming Karl Marx and Pope Leo XIII thus is
perhaps best grasped through a comment of Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues
that despite all that was right in every single official condemnation of
Marxism by the Catholic Church, nevertheless Catholic theologians did generally fail to see how Marx was in fact correct in his diagnosis of the internal
relation of theory and practice.19 The Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg understood this internal relation as deeply as Marx, and in this way she
can be thought of as another unlikely friend in the same conservative
radical sense. For her insight in this regard, Luxemburg was admired by the
Italian priest Don Luigi Giussani, who founded the ecclesial movement
Comunione e Liberazione to help young people battle against ideology: starting from experience.20 In his book The Religious Sense, Giussani invokes Rosa
Luxemburg for the revolutionary lucidity with which she stigmatized . . .
the creeping advance of the theoretician.21 In contrast to the organisational
centralism of her Russian counterpart V. I. Lenin, for whom revolutionary
consciousness depended on the extrinsic operation of a vanguard intelligentsia,22 Luxemburg held that revolution does not operate voluntaristically,
in an open field, according to a cunning plan laid out by strategists.23 For
her, rather, the political education of a people can only occur in the process
of the revolution itself, through the actual school of experience.24 Writing on
the nature of Luxemburgs insistence, Gyrgy Lukcs wrote in 1923:
The unity of theory and practice [for Luxemburg] exists not only in
theory but also for practice. We have seen that the proletariat as a class can
only conquer and retain a hold on class consciousness and raise itself to
the level of itsobjectively-givenhistoric task through conflict and
action. It is likewise true that the party and the individual fighter can only
really take possession of their theory if they are able to bring this unity
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into their praxis. The so-called religious faith [of Luxemburg in the spontaneous revolution] is nothing more than the certitude that regardless of
all temporary defeats and setbacks, the historical process will come to
fruition in our deeds and through our deeds.25
Lukcs helpfully highlights Luxemburgs attentiveness to the how, to the
unity of practice in theory and theory for practice. In this emphasis Luxemburg was significantly more radical than the author of the unfortunately titled
What is to be Done?26 and surprisingly closer in this one regard to the radicalism of Pope Leo XIII, who insisted that capitalism should be confronted, not
with any abstract theory (a cunning plan laid out by strategists), but with
the unabstractable practice of the Churchs liturgical how: Let the
working man be urged and led to the worship of God, to the earnest practice
of religion, and, among other things, to the keeping holy of Sundays and holy
days.27 But in this recourse to the concrete practice of the Church, the
radicalism of Pope Leo prevails precisely where the proposal of Luxemburg
begins to wane, despite her determination to save it from the antimonies of
modern political ideologism (the creeping advance of the theoretician).28
First, the religious faith internal to Luxemburgs theory of revolution is a
sola fidei certitude that, apart from the material reality of historical circumstances, nevertheless one can believe in a utopian expectation that the historical process will come to fruition. The faith of Luxemburg is thus
ironically abstractable from both historical reality and every visible community constituted by material practices.29 The abstractionism of this sola fidei
signals, on the one hand, that Luxemburgs theory of spontaneous revolution
remains nevertheless a spiritualisation of history to the extent that it is
neither attributable to a concrete school of experience nor to a real historical people, while, on the other hand (to make up for this) it must privilege
faciendum over esse,30 thus construing the unity of thought and practice as
a task by which humanity is required to conquer and retain . . .
through conflict and action . . . [to bring] the historical process . . . to fruition
in our deeds and through our deeds. Writing on Joseph Ratzingers diagnosis of
modernity, Denis Raymond Lemieux argues that the modern privileging of
faciendum over esse involves the fundamental shift entailed by Enlightenment
anthropology whereby man becomes a product of man instead of being a
reflection of the image of God who knows his existence to be first a gift before
becoming a task.31 Luxemburgs proposal thus remains well within the
modern liberal self-understanding of the human as a product of human
achievement and in this regard her idea of human solidarity is construed as
something that above all must be achieved by deed rather than received in
the form of an anterior gift. Luxemburgs complicity in modernitys disproportionate elevation of human doing and making over receptivity and
being goes a long way in explaining why her theorydespite its value
against certain forms of ideologismnevertheless remains nearer to the
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abstract politics of liberal choice than to the thick solidarity that evidences
a real people who live and believe from one generation to the next through a
tradition and a common set of material practices. The death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ, by contrast, established precisely such a solidarity, the real
historical people called the Church. Hauerwas illustrates that herein lies
one of the key and enduring radicalities of Christianity over and against
every modern radical political project: the Church is a genuine polis, a real
people with an alternative politics to the politics that dominate our lives.32
It is thus incumbent upon Christians to resist the modern temptation to
spiritualise their faith, and thus be and remain,
a community, a colony of resident aliens which is so shaped by our
convictions that no one even has to ask what we mean by confessing
belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.33
Hauerwas understands Pope John Paul II as effectively proposing the
Church-as-polis in his encyclical Centesimus annus. Like Pope Leo XIIIs Rerum
novarum, Centesimus annus presumed a radical ecclesial vision: it is the
church, and the church alone, which provides the world with the means to
know the substance of the good society.34 From this radical standpoint
Centesimus annus makes a very moderate proposal concerning political
economy. Against the abstractionism that would preoccupy itself with arguments over which system is best (capitalist, socialist or a third way),
Centesimus annus reminds us that,
models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who
responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic,
political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another.35
The Church has no cunning plan to offer, all she can do is propose herself
as the true school of experience, the alternative to all such models.36 Thus
the Popes modesty about economics is based on his rightful immodesty
about the significance of the church.37 In this way the question of human
work is reconfigured into the question: What kind of moral habits and
institutions are necessary to encourage good brewers to brew good beer?38
But not only so, in the context of the ideological collapse of Soviet communism, John Paul II was un-asking the ideological question of which politicoeconomic system was better, suggesting rather that true human flourishing
required a more radical question, one the Church could only pose by proposing herself. In this way, moreover, the Pope signalled that he was already
aware of the ambiguous result of the so-called revolutions of 1989. Insofar
as the Fall of Communism entailed an ideological transformation from
communism to neo-liberalism, the transition did not in fact liberate the
Church to be the Church in a new epoch of freedom. To the contrary, in those
countries in which the Church had once suffered under the theocratic policy
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of state-enforced atheism, the new liberal reality would be less direct, more
hidden but no less dangerous to the life of a people who live by memory and
tradition.39 As Archbishop Martnez writes:
Liberalism (with its economic counterpart, capitalism) . . . is a danger
that could prove worse than communism, because it masks itself and
remains hidden, and for that reason, it does not generate resistance
against itself. It might well happen that liberalism could succeed where
communism has failed, that is, in destroying the Church as a real people
with a culture and a tradition.40
To go further into this idea of the conservative radical, three related
proposals have decisively influencal my own work: (1) Christocentrism as
sequela Christi, (2) Christian politics as eschatology, and (3) witness as the
heart of Christian life.
(1) Sequela Christi. While Hauerwas insists on a Christocentrism that
affirms the dogmata of the Church, he is suspicious of anyone claiming to have
a well-worked-out Christology.41 If doctrinal orthodoxy is safeguarded
by the makeshifts of ecclesial dogmata, the real heart of Christian thought
proceeds not from dogmata but in sequela Christi.42 Christocentrism thus
involves the act of following: We cannot know Jesus without following
Jesus.43 Or as Cardinal Ratzinger once put it: The way that God is seen in
the world is by following Christ; seeing is going, is being on the way.44
Proceeding in sequela Christi involves a necessary recovery of narrative
and the recognition that God is hypertemporal; God is, as Hauerwas
reminds us, more temporal than we are45 (I would say hypertemporal to
the point of changeless simplicity). But, [i]f real events are the center of
history . . . then the fulfillment and culmination of Gods purposes must also
be really historic. The God of the Bible is not timeless.46 This highlights
Hauerwass concern that the first task of the Church is simply to make the
world the world:
The world simply cannot be narratedthe world cannot have a story
unless a people exist who make the world the world. That is an eschatological claim that presupposes we know there was a beginning only
because we have the end.47
As Hans Urs von Balthasar once noted, this reality puts the Church in a
unique position: she knows and lives fully the beginning and end and
therefore can affirm the full depth of the present.48 Hauerwas has helped me
to understand how the world is presentis really realwhen it is narrated
truthfully through the presence of God in Christ (in his incarnate life and
in his Eucharistic gift). Narrative and metaphysics, Hauerwas has convinced
me, are internally constituted: If we existed by necessity, we would not need
a story.49
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(2) Eschatology. Sequela Christi is an elegant way of talking about Hauerwass Christocentrism. Another way of talking about it is to talk of the no
bullshit quality to Barths thought that appealed to a bricklayer from
Texas.50
Commenting in his Gifford Lectures on the Barmen Declaration and
Barths refusal to take the oath of loyalty to the Fhrer, Hauerwas reminds us
how few people in the beginning diagnosed who Hitler was or what he
stood for. 51 Barths clarity was rooted in his apocalyptic and Christocentric
rejection of liberal Protestantism.52 For Hauerwas, this side of the Holocaust,
Barth has . . . earned the right to ask us all to see why his discovery of the
strange new world of the Bible is necessary for us to name as well as to resist
the demons unleashed in the name of humanity.53
The strange new world of the Bible is the new history of a people constituted by the encounter with God in Christ: When God enters [history]
. . . something wholly different and new beginsa history with its own distinct grounds, possibilities, and hypotheses.54 The spirit of the apocalyptic
Christocentrism Hauerwas learned from Barth is programmatically stated by
John Paul II in the first sentence of Redemptor hominis: The redeemer of man,
Jesus Christ, is the centre of the universe and of history.55 This centrality of
Christ entails what Hauerwas calls, the temporal paradox of Christian life:56
in the Cross, history has come to its decisive climax and now the Resurrected
Christ rules over the powers and principalities, which are nevertheless not
yet subdued. Christians live a reality that is both already but not yet; they
live in the violence of the present age but they do so as citizens of another
polis, the peaceable Kingdom that abides the end of history. This means that
Christian politics cannot begin with anxious, self-serving questions of what
we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right . . . in Christ,
God has already made history come out right.57 Christian politics, therefore,
as Hauerwas has taught me, involves learning to live without trying to force
contingency into conformity.58 Giving all sovereign allegiance to the crucified and risen Jesus, Christians are freed to work for peace because through
the Cross we already know something about the end.59
The implication of the Gospels eschatological character is something
Hauerwas learned first from Barth but then again, profoundly, from John
Howard Yoder.60 Yoder specified the political implications of the eschatological fact of Christianity in terms of his analysis of the Constantinian
nature of modern Christian historical thinking,61 which involves associating
Gods providence, not with the event of Christ, but with the rulers of
the world.62 Constantinianism, for Yoder, misconstrues the centre of the
cosmos and of history as if the centre were in the cosmos and not in the
church.63 The cosmic centre thus inverted, Constantinianism neutralises
the eschatological meaning of the Christian polis, now expendable since the
true meaning of history, the true locus of salvation, is construed as being
done primarily through the framework of society as a whole and not in the
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Christian community.64 Recovering the truth of the Cross as the central

event of history frees the Christian from cultural captivity in the world,
allowing him to live with the distinctive gentleness of one who lives
beyond time, who has learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph
through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the
meekness of a cross.65
(3) Witnesses. In Hannahs Child, Hauerwas claims that one of the burdens of
his Gifford Lectures was to show how Barths recovery of the apocalyptic
character of Christian convictions was a rational acknowledgement that we
cannot divorce our descriptions of the way the world is from how we are to
live and what we must be if we are to describe the world rightly.66 What
Barth adds to the internal unity of theory and practice is the language of
witness: Just as the Son witnesses to the Father so the Spirit makes us
witnesses to the Son so that the world may know the Father.67 What Hauerwas adds to Barth is an insistence that the truth of the Christian profession
is ensured by the practical witness of the Christian polis: If what Christians believe about God and the world could be known without witnesses,
then we would have evidence that what Christians believe about God and the
world is not true.68
Hauerwas ended his Gifford Lectures by suggesting that John Paul II and
John Howard Yoder, are two theologically articulate witnesses whose
witness has required them to say why the truth of what the church proclaims
cannot be known as truth without witnesses.69 The common witness of John
Paul and Yoder involves their effort to live and think how the Church should
be the Church in a post-Constantinian age. In both cases, for Hauerwas,
practice and commitment to non-violence is central.
John Pauls non-violence (which, to be sure, is not the pacifism of either
Hauerwas or Yoder) is rooted in his negative description of late modernitys
culture of death.70 Confronted with the culture of death, John Paul was
moved to declare that the Church could no longer afford to entertain a
distinction between faith and morality.71 The old habits of proposing
natural law solutions would now have to give way a new and radical
ecclesial practice: against the culture of death, the Church can do nothing
but live, bear witness, and propose the Gospel of Life, which is Jesus Christ.
In this way the Church was called by John Paul to rediscover the actual
school of experience that constitutes her as a real people, a people with a
living knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments,
and a truth to be lived out.72 For this and no other reason being Christian is
radical. It means that in the midst of a liberal democratic culture of death,
where the impulse to destroy the Church as a real people remains hidden
under the banners of freedom of choice and cultural tolerance, the
instruments of ecclesial resistance can be discerned in the unlikely friendship of the first post-Constantinian Pope73 and an American Mennonite
theologian:
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[J]ust as war makes strange bedfellows, so in this time after Christendom,

we Christians should not be surprised to discover that those who we once
thought enemies are in fact friends. John Howard Yoder and John Paul II
represent the recovery of the politics necessary for us to understand why
witness is not simply something Christians do but is at the heart of
understanding how that to which Christians witness is true.74
Haec quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis. Hauerwas says it well:
We live by memory. The central act of the church is an action of memory.75
The radix of the Christian people is communion with Jesus Christ in the
Eucharist. This is possible only through what Peter Candler has termed a
liturgically trained memory (or a school of memory) in which we participate, in Christ, in the human encounter with God.76 Following Conor
Cunningham we could specify that this school of memory is simply the
truth of life as anamnesis.77
We Christians are therefore conservative radicals because we must, in
order to be Christian, inherit a memory that can only be lived insofar as it is
received within the common life of a real people, a people whose history
testifies to the truth of that memory. This mysterious communion can be
known, if not understood, as Artur Mrwczynski-Van Allen puts it, as the
living gift of the experience of life as giftas a lived gift therefore given, a life
given therefore livedtransmitted from generation to generation.78 In Hannahs Child Stanley Hauerwas has dared to give us his best work: a theological
memoir of a life given and therefore lived. A beautiful gift to be sure.

NOTES
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John Milbank, The Legend of Death: Two Poetic Sequences (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008),
p. 173.
Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009),
p. 10.
See Denis Sureau, Pour une nouvelle thologie politique (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2008).
Stanley Hauerwas, Bonhoeffer: The Truthful Witness, Homiletics Interview, Homiletics
Online, on line at http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/interviews/hauerwas.asp
Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church, p. 23.
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannahs Child: A Theologians Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), p. 8.
Ibid., p. x.
Ibid., p. 159.
Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 67.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, pp. 63, 96 and 160.
This contrast is well explored in Francis Cardinal George OMI, The Difference God Makes: A
Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing
Company, 2009).
Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 37.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 40.

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Aaron Riches
Stanley Hauerwas, In Praise of Centesimus annus, Theology Vol. 768 (1992), pp. 416432;
reprinted in Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame and
London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 125142. Cf. Stanley Hauerwas, The
Future of Christian Social Ethics, in George Devine (ed), That They May Live: Theological
Reflections on the Quality of Life (Staten Island, NY: Alba House 1972), pp. 123131.
Hauerwas, In Good Company, p. 126.
Ibid., p. 126.
See Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001),
pp. 2223, n. 17. Alasdair MacIntyres comment comes from the 1995 Introduction to
Marxism and Christianity (London: Duckworth, 1995); reprinted in succession with the other
Introductions of the book as Epilogue. 1953, 1968, 1995: Three Perspectives, in Paul
Blackledge and Neil Davidson (eds), Alasdair MacIntyres Engagement with Marxism: Selected
Writings 19531974 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006), pp. 411425.
Julin Carrn, To Live Always the Real Intensely, Notes from the talks by Davide Prosperi and
Fr. Julin Carrn at the Beginning Day for adults and university students of CL, Assago,
Italy, October 1, 2011, in Traces, Vol. 13 (October 2011), p. vii.
Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, trans. John Zucchi (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 1997), pp. 9596; citing Rosa Luxemburg, Lettere ai Kautsky (Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1971), p. 47.
See V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done?, in Henry M. Christman (ed), Lenin: What Is To Be
Done and Other Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1987), pp. 53175, here at p. 112. This is a
standard characterisation of Lenins theory of the vanguard party; it has recently been
challenged by Lars Lih, see his Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context (Leiden: Brill
Academic, 2005). Even while Luxemburg at times is sharply critical of Lenin to the point of
seeming to occupy a alternative pole in contrast to him, it was in fact only after her death that
this construal became commonplace. In fact in most of the texts in which she is critical of
Lenin, she is at the same time directly defending one aspect or other of his fundamental
political programme. Ultimately her position vis--vis Lenin, the vanguard party and the
Bolshevik Revolution was ambiguous. See Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Introduction to The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 2325.
For a recent attempt to construe Luxemburg and Lenin as set well apart, while rejecting
Luxemburgs emphasis on spontaneity and revolutionary democracy in favour of a Leninist
vanguard, see Slavoj iek, George Lukcs as the Philosopher of Lenin, in The Universal
Exception: Selected Writings (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 94123.
Rosa Luxemburg, Order Reigns in Berlin, in Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (eds),
The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 373377, here
at p. 375.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Union, in The Rosa
Luxemburg Reader, pp. 168199, here at p. 182.
George Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 43.
Of course before it was Lenins question it was the title of a remarkably dull book by Nikolai
Chernyshevsky.
Leo, Rerum novarum, 57.
In this regard we should note Herbert McCabes suggestion that the quarrel between
Christianity and Marxism is a quarrel about the nature of revolution and the interpretation
of Jesus: if the Marxist is right then the Christian preoccupation with death as the ultimate
revolutionary act is a diversion from the real demands of history, while if the Christian is
right then the Marxist conception of revolution turns out to be relatively superficial, because
it has not yet touched the ultimate root of alienation. Cf. Herbert McCabe OP, Law, Love and
Language (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 135. I am grateful to Matthew Whelan for this
reference and other helpful comments.
Hauerwas, State of the University, p. 40.
Denis Raymond Lemieux, She Is Our Response: The Virgin Mary and the Churchs Encounter
with Modernity in the Writings of Joseph Ratzinger (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the
Immaculate, 2011), p. 4852.
Lemieux, She Is Our Response, p. 50; cf. Joseph Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, trans.
Brian McNeil (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006), pp. 1118, and 3437.

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Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom, with a new Preface by the Author (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon Press, 1999), p. 6.
Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press,
1989), p. 171.
Hauerwas, In Good Company, p. 126.
John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 43; as quoted in Hauerwas, In Good Company, p. 127.
Hauerwas, In Good Company, p. 127.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 131.
Cf. Kardyna Karol Wojtya, Znak sprzeciwu: Rekolekcje w Watykanie od 5 do 12 marca 1976
(Krakw: Znak, 1995), p. 236.
Javier Martnez, Arzobispo de Granada, Ms all de la razn secular: Algunos retos contemporneos para la vida y el pensamiento de la Iglesia, vistos desde Occidente (Granada: Editorial
Nuevo Inicio, 2008), p. 67.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 59.
Cf. Luigi Giussani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, trans. John Zucchin (Montral and
Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), pp. 98100.
Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 55.
Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, trans. Michael J. Miller, (San Francisco, CA:
Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 27.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 158.
Ibid.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 158.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham
Harrison, (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 190191.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 157.
Ibid., p. 59.
Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 171.
Ibid., pp. 171172.
Ibid., p. 171.
Karl Barth, The Strange New World of the Bible, in The Word of God and the Word of Man,
trans. D. Horton, (Boston, MA: Pilgrim, 1928), p. 37.
John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, 1.
Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 33.
Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 87.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 137.
Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 89.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 136.
John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Eugene, OR: Wipf
and Stock, 1998), pp. 148182.
See John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 136137.
John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiastical and Ecumenical (Scottdale, PA:
Herald Press, 1994), p. 198.
Yoder, The Original Revolution, p. 154.
Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 39.
Ibid., p. 264.
Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 207.
Ibid., p. 207.
Ibid., p. 218.
John Paul II, Evangelium vitae.
Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 229.
John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, 89; quoted by Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 229.
On John Paul II as the first post-Constantinian Pope, see George Weigel, Witness to Hope:
The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 295299; and
The Papacy and Power, First Things Vol. 110 (February, 2001), pp. 1825. Cf. Hauerwas,
With the Grain of the Universe, p. 226, where he approvingly quotes Weigels phrase.
Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 217.

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75 Hauerwas, Hannahs Child, p. 257.

76 See Peter M. Candler Jr, Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or, Reading Scripture Together on the
Path to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006).
77 Conor Cunningham, Being Recalled: Life as Anamnesis, in Harm Goris, Herwi Rikhof,
Henk Schoot (eds), Transcendence and Immanence in Aquinas (Leuven: Peeters, 2007),
pp. 5980.
78 Artur Mrwczynski-Van Allen, A propsito de V. Grossman: El hombre, la literatura y el estado
totalitario (Granada: Editorial Nuevo Inicio, 2012), p. 46 of typescript.

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd