I'm going to be posting bits and pieces from Stanley Hauerwas' recently released memoir over the next couple weeks as I work through it. I hope to start writing again more regularly myself, but I have been on a personal sabbatical as I read and think in new directions in preparation for my new calling to the secular academy.
This excerpt seems to capture the heart of why I think I am heading into the academy, as a Christian preacher (which is to say a "practicing theologian"), to do theological work in an English department...
"I think Christian 'ethics' depends on developing the eye of the novelist. If my work is compelling, I suspect it is so to the degree I am able to write like a novelist. If I have a novelist's eye, it is not accidental. I have, after all, spent many years reading novels. Reading novels will not necessarily make one better able to see without illusion, but it can help. My ability to see, moreover, depends on how I have come to understand what it means to be a Christian. I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth."
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