Wells, the new Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, has written a book both strangely familiar and familiarly provocative. Strangely familiar because Wells's description of Christian ethics intuitively feels more like what most of us do when we are ‘doing’ Christian ethics than descriptions given in most other books in the field. Familiarly provocative because Wells continues a trajectory of thought developed most recognisably by Stanley Hauerwas (whose thought was the subject of Wells's earlier book) – a trajectory that rejects violence, finds its theological centre in ecclesiastical practices, and emphasises the place of tradition for pursuing a moral Christian life. Whether the strangely familiar and the familiarly provocative hang together in the book is a question for the end of the review – and for its (hopefully) many readers.

Wells makes the strange familiar by describing Christian ethics in terms of theatrical improvisation as provided for him by drama professor and playwright Keith Johnstone. ‘Improvisation in the theatre’, Wells tells us, ‘is a practice through which actors seek to develop trust in themselves and one another in order that they may conduct unscripted dramas without fear’ (p. 11). Likewise, his book ‘is a study of how the church may become a community of trust in order that it may faithfully encounter the unknown of the future without fear. . .[by] faithfully improvising on the Christian tradition’ (p. 11). The church practises at faithful living, so that when it faces new morally disruptive events it needs neither to seek new answers (in, for example, philosophical systems like deontology or utilitarianism) nor to force its established answers to fit. Instead, it relies on its worship-formed instincts – which are, variously, habits and forms of imagination – to continue doing what it has always done: keep the story of God's work in the world going.

Towards this end – and again relying on the language of improvisational theatre – Wells suggests that the church must first assess the status of the persons and groups with which it interacts and then, based on that assessment, must choose to respond to the offer they make on the Christian story in one of three ways. It can block (i.e. reject) the offer, thereby closing off that particular approach to the story. (Since blocking treats the offer in terms of rivalry and the church in terms of control, blocking is an inherently violent act in Wells's understanding. So vehement is his opposition to blocking that he seemingly blocks blocking.) It can accept the offer, thereby allowing its story to go on but in terms dictated by the other. Or it can overaccept the offer, seeing it as neither a threat to be blocked nor a given to be accepted, but as a gift to be (non-violently) welcomed and explored in the light of the church's prior and larger understanding of its story about God's graceful work in the world. These ideas of assessing status, blocking, accepting and overaccepting constitute the heart of the book and the range of actions available to the church in its social engagements: think H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (ana)baptised.

Having described the moral practices of church life, Wells concludes the book with four chapters in which he takes up particular concerns and events in order to model those practices. In the first two, he attempts to overaccept the threatening offers of moral and natural evil rather than blocking them; in the latter two, he attempts to overaccept the promising offers of human cloning and genetically modified food rather than accepting them. These four chapters, though, hardly constitute the totality of his modelling. By writing winsomely – humorously in places, sorrowfully in others, thoughtfully and accessibly throughout – and thinking creatively (‘questioning givens’, Wells would say), the entire book is literally exemplary.

Which is not to say it is beyond criticism – but how to criticise without blocking? Perhaps by suggesting that at times the book's ‘familiarly provocative’ parts interfere with its ‘strangely familiar’ power. For example, when Wells covers both the history of the church and the range of Christian ethics in the first two short chapters, the descriptions are too thin, too stereotypological, and therefore too transparently apologetic, in accepting a particular vision of church practices we have already heard from Hauerwas, to be worthy not only of a scholar so willing and able to think in bold and fresh ways, but of a church which Wells argues should rely on the richness of its long memory rather than on the originality of its latest members when it needs to improvise. Rather than accepting these chapters as descriptions of church history and ethics, they become gifts to us when overaccepting them throws us back into deeper explorations of the church's complex relationship with violence for instance or prepares us for arguments about whether forgotten practices of the church can really provide us with a theologically coherent approach to living in response to God's continuing work in the world. As with criticisms of the first two chapters, so with criticisms of, for example, Wells's confidence that imagination and fidelity can overcome tragedy, his rather singular and idealistic vision of the church, or his too quick movement from practices of worship to statements of social ethics: rather than accept the familiarly provocative, we should see them as gifts that drive us towards further – and strangely familiar – explorations and arguments. Fortunately, when we turn to those explorations and arguments, we find Wells there with us and will be the better for it.