Revisionists and traditionalists appeal to Acts 15, welcoming the Gentiles, for analogies directing the church's response to homosexual persons. John Perry has analyzed the major positions. He faults revisionists for inadequate attention to the Jerusalem Decree and faults one traditionalist for using the Decree literally rather than through analogy. I argue that analogical use of the Decree must supplement rather than displace the plain sense. The Decree has been neglected due to assumptions that Paul opposed it, that it expired, or because Gentiles wanted non-kosher meat. I argue that Paul continued to observe the Torah and supported the Decree, that it has not expired, and that Gentile desire for non-kosher meat is not a firm obstacle. Affirming the plain sense of the Decree, I develop the analogy from Acts 15 to homosexual persons.

One strand of the church's conversation about homosexuality compares present-day acceptance of homosexuals to the church's acceptance of Gentiles in Acts 15. In a previous article, “Gentiles and Homosexuals,” I presented the history of that strand. In a reply to my article, Olson proposes to reimagine the analogy via the “radical new perspective on Paul” and argues that doing so exposes problems with my original analysis. I defend myself against these criticisms, while also entering into the spirit of Olson's reimagined analogy. Expanding the scope beyond Acts to Paul opens up important facets that might otherwise be obscured. In particular, it includes voices that are sometimes silenced, and presses both sides for an account of sexuality grounded in vocation and God's purposes in creation.

Stanley Hauerwas's contribution to the study of Christian ethics is analyzed in the course of offering an overview of his work, including (1) his early reflections on “vision,”“narrative,” and moral agency; (2) his continuing focus on Christian virtues and practices in contrast to the ethos of moral and political liberalism; and (3) his specific attention to the meaning of peaceableness and the rejection of violence. The essay concludes by considering Hauerwas's legacy as a postliberal theologian, a critical participant in American Protestant ethics, and a conversation partner with Roman Catholics.

In this essay Stanley Hauerwas reflects on his life's work by responding to the critical contributions found in the essays of this volume. Rather than trying to defend a “position,” Hauerwas takes this opportunity to offer further insight into how he sees his work to be driven by theology, insofar as his ethical reflection cannot be extricated from Christological considerations. It is this Christological center that allows him to avoid making a false separation between the person and work of Jesus Christ. For Hauerwas, only in maintaining its Christological center can Christian “ethics” be understood in continuity with the practices of the church, including the practice of Christian speech. Without this continuity, “ethics” fails to be theological.

In this paper I examine criticism of Hauerwas's critique of American democracy and liberalism, and of American violence and war, as sectarian and politically irrelevant. This twin account has the merit of engaging his critics from left and right. I show that his critique of American Christians, and their support of America's ways of promoting justice and freedom at home and in the world, has analogies with Foucault's genealogical project in France, and represents a more powerful critique of American imperialism and militarism, and of a compliant church, than efforts to sustain the purchase of rights talk or liberal justice in contemporary theological ethics.

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism.

In essays written throughout his career, Stanley Hauerwas has unfolded a Christian vision of the marriage bond and the presence of children that seeks insistently to place these seemingly natural bonds within the new family of God that is the church. I examine his understanding, aiming to appreciate the Christian vision displayed while also suggesting that his emphasis on the new thing God does in the church is sometimes allowed to absorb and thereby lose the distinctive significance of the created bonds of marriage and family.

This essay addresses moral hazards associated with the emerging doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It reviews the broad acceptance by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches of the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008, and attempts to identify grounds for more adequate investigation of the moral issues arising. Three themes are pursued: how a changing political context is affecting notions of sovereignty; the authority that can approve or refuse the use of force; and plural foundations for human rights in a religiously and otherwise plural world such that the human rights protection does not become tyrannical.

In his 2001 book, With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas has made an extended case for Karl Barth as the model for how to do Christian ethics, and for Reinhold Niebuhr as the model for how not to do it. Though Barth's closer and deeper theological connection to the Christian tradition appeals to a Jewish traditionalist by analogy, nevertheless, Niebuhr's approach to social ethics, based as it is on a version of natural law, is of greater appeal. That is because it is more philosophically arguable in a secular society and culture, and because it is more politically effective there. It is what made Niebuhr a more effective opponent of Nazism than was Barth. Also, Niebuhr's version of natural law is not a christianized version of Stoic natural law teaching but, rather, a profound use of the biblical prohibition of idolatry, having heretofore unnoticed affinities with rabbinic developments of that prohibition.

Using interviews with activists and Lisa Sowle Cahill's concept of participatory discourse, this article examines how the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) built solidarity for the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. The analysis explores the morally formative connections between GBIO's activist strategies and its public liturgy for reform. The solidarity generated through this interfaith coalition's activities and religious arguments contrasts with two standard types of policy discourse, economics and liberalism. Arguments for health care reform based on economic efficiency or positive rights are hampered by the lack of solidarity in U.S. political culture. GBIO's congregation-based organizing offers a performative model of public argumentation for religious groups committed to achieving affordable, quality health care for all Americans.

After introducing the five articles that comprise this focus issue, I consider Hauerwas's claim that he is a theologian without a position. The claim has merit, I hold, since Hauerwas writes in response to what he reads, which is his way of learning it better. Moreover, he writes socially, characteristically soliciting help from his friends. As such, he purposefully makes himself accountable to those he addresses. In his later years this accountability has extended especially to the Church and to the Bible, which helps explain why Hauerwas cares so deeply about his sermons, which he takes to be his most important work.