Hannah’s Child: A Theological Memoir
by Stanley Hauerwas
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 288 pp., $24.99

Reviewed by Martha K. Baker


    I didn’t know half the names Stanley Hauerwas dropped -- and still I could barely put down his memoir.

    I couldn’t wrap my mind around half the theologies he described -- but I kept reading every word.

    I hadn’t read any of Hauerwas’s many books, articles and class notes before devouring Hannah’s Child -- nevertheless, I pressed this book to my bosom.

    The only reason I can figure out for my enjoyment of this book is Stanley Hauerwas himself: He is fully present on every page of his memoir, not because he’s standing in the light but because he’s operating the follow-spot in this theater. In his play, the signifying and of-repeated words are “gift” and “friendship.”

    His life began in Texas, the temperatures as high as the braggadocio is broad.  Hauerwas’s story was inspired by his mother’s prayer: When she couldn’t conceive, she echoed Hannah’s prayer and promised, that if given a child, she would regift her child to God. This backstory did not best please Hauerwas: “It was perfectly appropriate for my mother to pray Hannah’s prayer -- but did she have to tell me she had done so?” He felt doomed by her promise for his life. However, he adds, “...I am quite sure, strange servant of God though I may be, that whatever it means to be Stanley Hauerwas is the result of that prayer.”

    At seven years old, to squirm out from under his mother’s control, he happily went off to work with his father, a bricklayer. Bricklaying is an art, and Hauerwas pays it homage as he describes, with juicy jargon, just how to do it. But it is more. Bricklaying comes under the general heading of “work,” and Hauerwas is a worker, wired with his mother’s voltage and his father’s craft and work ethic. “If the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.” 

    Hauerwas works. He worked his way from high school in Pleasant Grove, Texas, to Yale (though how he shifted from Texas to Connecticut without getting the bends requires an engineer’s analysis). He worked his way through a Ph.D. in Christian ethics. After discovering that the other students in divinity school were actually preparing to become ministers and knowing he would have none of that, he worked by teaching: he taught Bible at Augustana, a Lutheran college in a Midwestern town; theology at Notre Dame, he, a putative Protestant in a Roman Catholic citadel; and theological ethics at Duke University in North Carolina, where he holds a chair as professor of theological ethics.    

    He writes, serves on committees, advises on dissertations; volunteers on boards;  he reads and writes volumes, lectures and preaches. Time magazine, in the issue dated 9/10/01, declared him “America’s best theologian.” After the massacres of 9/11/01, as war loomed, Hauerwas publicly declared himself a pacifist, for his mentor, John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite, had long before convinced him that “nonviolence and Christianity are inseparable.”

    Hauerwas continues to work long and lovingly at being Adam’s father and Paula Gibson’s husband. He works at becoming a Christian, a “slow, agonizing, and happy process.” Indeed, by the end of Hannah’s Child, Hauerwas notes that the greatest surprise of his life is, “I am a Christian. How interesting.”

    Hauerwas’ memoir is unfailingly honest. He’s especially honest about himself, even painfully so, as he describes humiliating -- though sometimes funny -- moments of his own failures and growth. He doubtlessly could have spoken more dramatically of the 24 years with his bi-polar first wife but no less honestly. He names contestants’ names in the phallomachy of departmental disputes. He baldly appraises the South (make that “Souths,” considering the diverse cultures of Texas and North Carolina) and various denominations (baptized a Methodist, attended a Roman Catholic church, and now a communicant at an Episcopal church). He says he was drawn into the church because he did not want “to live a lie”: “...I am a Christian because I believe that by so being I have a better chance of living truthfully.”

    Hannah’s Child captures the times and places of Hauerwas’ life and, thus, the nation’s and the church’s. It is a memoir, with recreated conversations not secretarial stenography. Pictures would have been awfully nice -- so would page numbers on the left-hand side of the book. Oh, and an index.

    In this fine, intense workbook, Stanley Hauerwas repeats the words “gift” and “friendship,” again and again. In his epilogue, he writes about what he discovered about himself in the process of writing this memoir, and decides that the word that describes the discovery best is “gratitude.” That word could also describe a reader’s response: Hannah’s Child is a gift, dedicated to God, and we are grateful, indeed.

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