The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Illuminations: Theory & Religion) - Hardcover

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Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University and holds a joint appointment in Duke Law School. He is known to be controversial and outspoken; his stand as a pacifist against the Iraq war made him a nationally recognized dissident but won him few friends. His work cuts across disciplinary lines: systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics.

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The book is an attempt to reclaim the knowledge of God as just that - knowledge.

It is no secret that theology is no longer considered a necessary subject in the modern university. Why is it assumed that the kind of knowledge theology represents is in some fashion deficient when compared to other subjects? Hauerwas argues that theology is often excluded from the knowledges of the modern university because those knowledges are constituted by an understanding of time necessary to make economic and state realities seem inevitable. Yet it is precisely this difference that makes Christian theology, while being governed by a different understanding of time than that characteristic of the other disciplines of the university, an essential resource for the university to achieve its task - that is, to form people who are able to imagine a different world through critical and disciplined reflection.

Hauerwas subsequently challenges the domesticated character of much recent theology by suggesting how prayer and the love of the poor are essential practices that should shape the theological task. Hauerwas makes this case by conversing with figures as diverse as Luigi Giussani, David Burrell, Stanley Fish, Wendell Berry, Jeff Stout, Rowan Williams and Sheldon Wolin.