Special Event

Leading Theologian Stanley Hauerwas to Speak at JTP Community Forum in February

Theologian Stanley M. Hauerwas speaks on how people of faith should respond to hatred, hostility, and violence at The Justice Theater Project’s February Community Forum.

In conjunction with its performances of Witness from February 18-20 and 24-27, 2005, The Justice Theater Project is pleased to welcome esteemed theologian Stanley Hauerwas to speak at its February Community Forum on Sunday, February 27 at 7:00 PM at the Catholic Community of St Francis of Assisi. The forum will include staged readings from the novel Witness by Newberry Award winner Karen Hesse and “Hauerwasian” insights around key themes from the play and novel including how people of faith should respond to acts of hatred, violence, and hostility increasingly present in the modern world.

In the Sept. 17, 2001 issue of Time magazine Hauerwas was described as “contemporary theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur.” He “has been a thorn in the side of what he takes to be Christian complacency for more than 30 years,” says Time author Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. “For him, the message of Jesus was a radical one to which Christians, for the most part, have never been fully faithful.” Hauerwas, she goes on to say, challenges people of a variety of faiths to be committed to what they believe. “He urges people to be faithful Roman Catholics or Orthodox Jews or evangelicals or Muslims,” Elshtain said of Hauerwas. “It is faithfulness to a complex tradition that forestalls being overtaken by majoritarianism or convention.”

In April 2000, Christianity Today named his book, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame Press, 1981), one of the 100 most important books on religion of the 20th century. Hauerwas was the first United Methodist theologian to deliver the Gifford Lectures in St. Andrews, Scotland. The Giffords are widely regarded as the world’s most distinguished lecture series in the fields of philosophy, natural theology and religion. His series of eight lectures, collectively titled With the Grain of the Universe, was published in 2002 by Brazos Press. Also in 2002, Duke University Press published The Hauerwas Reader, a 752-page collection of essays and book chapters written by the Duke theologian.

Hauerwas was born in 1940; raised in Texas; graduated with a bachelor’s degree in religion from Southwestern University in Texas and a doctorate from Yale Divinity School; taught for 14 years at the University of Notre Dame; joined Duke University in 1984 as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the United Methodist-related divinity school where he also holds a faculty appointment at Duke Law School; and was named by Time magazine as “America’s Best Theologian”.

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