There's a moment in George Eliot's Adam Bede when Mrs Poyser declares: ‘There's no pleasure i’ living, if you're to be corked up for iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.' When participants in one of Stanley Hauerwas's summer seminars at Duke University gave their teacher a gift in 1983, they chose a framed copy of this utterance of Mrs Poyser's. Hauerwas admits that it expresses his attitude to life very well, adding: ‘I am not a “leaky barrel.” I am more like a fire hose’ (233). Or a firebrand, perhaps. But rarely has there been one more gracious (albeit with a reputation for the sort of plain speaking that he learnt as a boy working for his bricklaying father).

In the epilogue to this remarkable memoir, its author wonders what kind of book he has written. Given that it is certainly a work of memory, ‘memoir’ will do as well as any other name for its genre, although Hauerwas would like to think of it as a work of testimony. It is a testimony to his life with others – with friends, family, colleagues, students, fellow worshippers, and with God. It is also an exercise in self-examination through the narration of a life; not a narration that simply recounts a succession of events composing a person's temporal existence, but an orchestration of autobiographical elements, an attempt to discern patterns and interconnections ‘that make the contingencies of a life intelligible’ (xi). Its title alludes to a prayer made by Joanna Hauerwas, Stanley's mother, in 1939. Echoing the biblical Hannah, she prayed that if God would give her a child, she would dedicate its life to God. Little can she have known that God would grant her such a feisty one. A possible way of construing the book is as a sustained effort to unravel the implications of his mother's prayer, to discover in what sense his life has indeed been dedicated to God.

Paying homage to the importance of the everyday, Hauerwas frequently emphasizes how it is the small things, the ordinary things, that play such a significant part in constituting our lives and relationships, and how just being present for others can make all the difference. Among other things, his memoir is a testimony to his own humanity, a humanity enlivened by the pulse of religious and philosophical inquiry, and tested by the trials of a painful marriage.

With regard to the book's philosophical content, readers will be disappointed if they pick it up expecting to find arguments for specific ‘positions’ in, say, natural theology or religious ethics. A memoir is hardly the place for such arguments, but even if it were, we would be unlikely to receive them from Hauerwas. He isn't that kind of theologian. If we are willing to relinquish an unduly restrictive conception of ‘argument’, however, there is plenty of argumentation to be found in this book. It is argument in the form of descriptive recollection. As in the case of works of literary fiction, the narrative of a life told from the inside lays before us events and decisions within their respective contexts. We may not be persuaded of the wisdom of Hauerwas's decisions or of the truth of his values, but the overwhelming virtue of a memoir such as this is its capacity to argue for the intelligibility of those decisions and values within the entirety of a life. By seeing them, not as the outcomes of discrete chains of reasoning, but as lived patterns in the weave of life, we are enabled to see their sense. We see, for example, the sense in Hauerwas's incessant habit of gratitude: the habit of viewing occurrences in his life, and his life as a whole, as gifts. Whether one is persuaded of the appropriateness, the truth, of such an attitude will depend on whether one feels able to see things that way, to assimilate the form of words into one's life. But how else could one be persuaded of the viability of appreciating as gifts such things as one's life, work, family, the natural world, and even the most intense criticisms of one's views offered by colleagues and opponents, other than by being shown how this kind of appreciation makes sense in a life? Hauerwas's memoir can help to teach us the sense that this kind of appreciation makes.

I suspect that many readers of this book will share my astonishment at the wealth of experience that Hauerwas's three-score-years-and-ten have contained up till now. He recounts in compelling straightforwardness how the trajectory of his life has carried him from ‘working-class kid’ to ‘the world of the university’ (121), from bricklayer's son to Time magazine's ‘best theologian in America’ (261). Over the course of the book, we come to see that these seven decades have been enormously productive for Hauerwas, generating not only some of the most insightful and ethically challenging works of theological contemplation and polemic of the last half-century, but also a life that has had a profound impact upon the intellectual and spiritual development of innumerable individuals. Not least among these individuals are Hauerwas's many students, at Augustana College in Illinois, at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and at Duke University in North Carolina, as well as the many other institutions at which he has more briefly lectured and taught.

One of the book's most refreshing features is the space that it gives to acknowledging the joy and exhilaration of learning and teaching, of working amidst colleagues and students in a vibrant academic environment. For any scholar writing a memoir, there must be a strong temptation to dwell upon one's written output, to divide one's life into stages according to what one was ‘working on’ at the time, and to show how ideas expressed in early essays and books came to be improved upon and superseded by later ones. Hauerwas does not need to resist this temptation, for he does not appear to feel it. Inevitably, many of his written works do receive a mention here and there; The Peaceable Kingdom, in particular, is cited as a locus of Hauerwas's central themes (136). But there is no systematic treatment of any of his previous writings. The other books he has written are simply woven into the overall fabric of his life, intermingled with his other pursuits, whether these be personal, political, religious, or all three. ‘I think, or at least hope,’ he writes, ‘that whatever the final verdict may be on “my work,” I will be understood first and foremost as a teacher’ (154). Later on, he muses thoughtfully on the art of supervising graduate dissertations, encouraging independent thought and enthusiasm in one's supervisees, and how such interactions can usefully shine a light back upon one's own life and values: ‘I have discovered that there is nothing quite like training graduate students, particularly in theology, to make you take your life seriously. They rightly expect that there should be some relationship between how and what you think and how you live’ (242). Many of Hauerwas's most valued friendships have been with graduate students. His stress on the importance of teaching as an endeavour of mutual inquiry in friendship has tremendous salience during these times of increasing commercialization of the higher education system.

Hauerwas's account of his life comes across as brutally honest. Most readers will be unable to avoid growing to like this man because of the simple humanity that permeates his words. Without trying to justify or excuse his foibles, he shows us what it is to live a life that struggles to hold onto one's integrity, a life that consists, as Hauerwas sees it, in learning what it is to be a Christian. In telling us his story, he does not shy away from opening the door into the dark background of his life. His first marriage, of twenty-four years, was plagued and haunted by the severe mental illness of his wife, Anne. She suffered from what is these days referred to as bipolar disorder. Her ‘episodes’ could be cruel and destructive, especially towards her husband; and the emotional barriers she put up against both him and their son, Adam, robbed her of any kind of life that many of us would regard as worthwhile. After relating the harrowing story of Anne's abandonment of the family home, her attempted suicide, and her eventual death of heart failure in her late fifties, Hauerwas boldly asks the painful question, ‘What possibly can be said about a life so lived?’ (207).

To this question, he does not try to provide any glib answer. Indeed, he counsels us against ever trying to answer such imponderables: ‘Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent’ (207). This recognition of the limits of theoretical reason, of the inappropriateness of certain attempts to explain or justify, is of a piece with Hauerwas's professed rejection of theories and ‘positions’ in theology, and especially his opposition to the project of theodicy. ‘When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that makes the world intelligible,’ Hauerwas writes, ‘it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be’ (207). Indeed, Hauerwas sees the expectation that God should somehow smooth out the roughness of the universe, preventing bad things happening to good people, as a sign of religious superficiality (237). Faith is not, for him, a means of resolving our bewilderment at a world so apparently saturated by contingencies and injustices, but ‘a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers’ (208). In this recognition of our unknowingness, there is a wisdom that transcends the kind of over-intellectualized cleverness of theodical constructions.

Such bald refusals to play the game of theodicy will leave many contemporary philosophers of religion dissatisfied. But it is this very quest for intellectual satisfaction, often at the expense of moral honesty, that the refusal to play the game places in question. When theodicies oblige us to ascribe abominable utilitarian calculations to one's Lord and Creator, to contemplate that the crushing of one human soul could be vindicated by the ‘improvement’ of another, they obscure from view the attitude of epistemic and moral humility wherein Christian belief finds its rightful home. Though Hauerwas is reluctant to admit to having adopted any particular ‘position’ in theology, the rejection of theodical reasoning could be characterized as part of his ‘non-position’.

Hauerwas's denial that theology should be in the business of providing theories or systems brings him into sympathy with thinkers such as Karl Barth and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He sees connections between these two figures in particular ‘just to the extent that they refused to “explain” ’ (60). Other influences upon his thought are gratefully acknowledged, most notably John Howard Yoder and Alasdair MacIntyre, but also such diverse figures as Collingwood, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, and one of his many teachers at Yale Divinity School, Paul Holmer. Here again the theme of ‘intellectual work as investigation’ rather than the acquiring and shoring up of a position is emphasized: ‘Positions are … useful if you are to make it as an academic. … But reading Wittgenstein with Mr. Holmer helped me see that positions far too easily get in the way of thought’ (60).

The extent to which Hauerwas has been inspired and influenced by his engagement with the work and personality of John Howard Yoder comes through strongly in the book. This is especially true of Hauerwas's aversion to any attempt at abstracting Christian belief from the eschatological ramifications of Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. I would have been interested to hear more about these ramifications, but the little we are offered in the way of exposition of Yoder leaves his ideas, at best, enigmatic. According to Hauerwas, Yoder argues that the Bible does not present a conception of the eternal as atemporal; rather, in Yoder's own words, ‘[the eternal] is not less like time, but more like time. It is like time to a higher degree. The kingdom is not immaterial, but is more like reality than reality is’ (quoted by Hauerwas, 158). Similarly cryptic is Hauerwas's remark, made with reference to Dennis Campbell (a dean of Duke Divinity School), that Campbell ‘could not imagine what it might mean to say that Christians live in a different time than those who do not share our faith’ (174). Such statements are fascinating, not least because they refuse to compromise with contemporary forces that would like to strip religious forms of language of their bold exclusivism, leaving only a warm saccharine glow of loving kindness that challenges no one. Still, however, it will be difficult for many critical readers to hear much in these statements other than grandiose dogmatic rhetoric. What does it mean to say that Christians live in a different time from others?

Hauerwas is unwaveringly committed to the absolute uniqueness of Christian faith – the faith, as he sees it, that Christ was wholly divine and wholly human. His life, it seems, has been a process of struggling to work out what this claim entails. One of its consequences, he maintains, is that Christians should have no truck with the presumption that there are certain ‘natural loyalties’ that should take precedence over a commitment to Christ; when the policies of one's government conflict with Christ's message of peace, one must speak out against the government. In recent years, this politicized conception of the Gospel has led to Hauerwas's vociferous opposition to the US administration's so-called ‘war on terror’. Hauerwas is candid in his acknowledgement of how such opposition has cost him friendships. He is clear, however, that to lose a friend under such circumstances is not to gain an enemy. ‘Rather, it means that as people of strong convictions we cannot pretend that the differences between us do not matter’ (272).

I am not a reader who came to this book already marinated in Hauerwas's theological writings, but it has certainly encouraged me to pay closer attention to his work than I have previously done. When reading those other works, I now feel that I have a deeper impression of who it is that is speaking to me and why he says what he does. I expect that other readers will share this experience, and this is one of the significant benefits of the present book: that it testifies to the life of a man who, through persistent devotion to theological inquiry, has produced works of outstanding religious insight, and thus helps to contextualize those works. In so doing, it also presents a unique ‘horse's mouth’ perspective on the world of Anglo-American theology over the last half century.