Here is a Stanley Hauerwas story. Hauerwas was debating a medical researcher who was defending experiments on fetal tissue. "What if it were discovered that fetal tissue were a delicacy?" Hauerwas asked with his trademark Texas twang. "Could you eat it?"
Hauerwas is contemporary theology's foremost intellectual provocateur. His depth charges are just as frequently aimed within that world as outside it. That "Hauerwasian" has become a common way in theological circles to characterize an argument is an irony, given that the Duke University Divinity School professor set out to place himself at the margin rather than in the center of...