Stanley Hauerwas

In Suffering Presence, ethicist Stanley Hauerwas delivers a well-formed theological perspective that illuminates the moral life, particularly medical care and the care of children and the handicapped.

Christian Ethics has been far too concerned with ethical decision-making. It would seem that both the advocates of 'situation ethics', with their ever more outlandish paradigms, and the proponents of traditional moral theology, with their carefully qualified abstract deliberations, have focused too narrowly upon the individual faced with a moral choice. This collection of essays comes as a much needed change. Whereas others have bemoaned the state of Christian ethics today, Hauerwas has attempted to work out a serious alternative to the situationists and to the traditional moral theologians. The book is divided into three parts. The first, and perhaps most important, deals with theoretical and methodological issues. The second, under the title 'the new morality and normative ethics', applies his method to a number of areas of individual morality, such as abortion and euthanasia. The third tackles certain problems in social ethics, namely the non-resistant church, politics and American culture.

In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas provides an account of moral existence and ethical rationality that shows how Christian convictions operate, or should operate, to form and direct lives. In attempting to conceptualize the basis of Christian ethics in a manner that will render Christian convictions morally intelligible, the author casts fresh light on traditional theoretical issues and articulates the distinctive Christian response to contemporary concerns such as suicide, medical ethics, and child care. The first section of the book deals with methodological issues: the meaning and nature of practical reason, obligation claims, natural law, and self deception, and the affinity of story and ethics. It focuses on the relation of truthfulness and tragedy and the need for a story—a set of religious convictions or "grammar of theology"—that does justice to the tragic character of human existence. The second section addresses substantive issues: suicide, euthanasia, and the value of survival; the moral limits of population growth; the definition of "person" for medical reasons; and social involvement and Christian ethics. The overall theme is the need for a community in which truthfulness is a way of life. In the final section, devoted to the problem of how to care for disabled children, the implications of the author's ethical position are given concrete expression. He discusses the assumptions underlying the willingness to have children, criteria for humanness, medical ethics, and how truthful communities deal with suffering. In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas extends and clarifies the ethical position set forth in his earlier books Character and the Christian Life and Vision and Virtue.