Strange as this may sound when said of his work, one is sometimes uncertain whether the dominant intellectual influences are really those of the theological tradition. In part, of course, this is only because he reads almost everything, but this volume articulates a rather abstract analysis that seldom enters into specifics. I would like him to leave that out from now on. And instead, I would like him to develop in more detail his defense of vegetarianism, or his claim that we can and should return to the concept of a just wage, or the assertion that we do not need to attribute any great significance to our work. I would like some help in thinking through my own participation in a modern economy.
Broadsides are useful up to a point, but they remain abstract and generalized.
More than all this, however, I would like to see him begin to draw less directly on our contemporaries and more directly on older Christian thinkers for whom practical questions were never divorced from theology. I don't, of course, suppose that even Hauerwas has time and energy to give us detailed help on all these matters. But I have been keeping company with him for a long time, and it has been good company, at least for me. In a peculiar way, however, he has focused so intensively on theological methodmaking his case against method-that the case has become an abstract and general one, aimed at anyone and everyone.