On Stanley
I was pondering earlier in the day why I like to read, and the joy that came from reading Hauerwas’s The Christian Difference confirmed my earlier suspicions: I read because I’m terribly masochistic, because I take some phenomenal pleasure in upending my own paradigms and replacing them with something new. I probably at one point found the same pleasure in practical moral challenge, which may have been the one redeeming feature of my masochism, but for the moment I’ve lost the strength for real change and settled for theoretical upheavals. After reading an essay like this one, I have this overwhelming desire to read every piece cited in his bibliography, just to preserve the nearly erotic sense of newness and difference. It makes me impatient, unwilling to enjoy the quotidian or to submit myself to the longsuffering discipline serious study requires. But tomorrow morning I will awake early, eager to read more theology, precisely because Stanley Hauerwas makes theology so incredible enjoyable. I would never so love the intricacies of theological debates were it not for the outrageous sarcasm and scathing wit of this man who has earned at the same time the desperate devotion and endless frustration of so many.
Damn you, Stanley Hauerwas. Thank God for you, Stanley Hauerwas.
2 September 2005 |
tags: Miscellaneous
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