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What is radical about the ordinary?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2010

Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas*
Affiliation:
Duke University Divinity School, Box 90967, Durham, NC 27708–0967, USAcarole.baker@duke.edu
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Extract

‘Radical Ordinary’ seemed like a good idea. The ‘ordinary’ is just, well, it is just so ordinary. No one is particularly attracted to the ‘ordinary’. But our lives are sustained by the ‘ordinary’. So maybe one of the ways to remind us of the significance of the ordinary is to qualify the ordinary by the word ‘radical’. A clever strategy that may, given Bowlin's response to the book Coles and I wrote, be far too clever.

Type
Response
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 96 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

1 See my Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living in between (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), pp. 253–66. Christian Existence Today was first published by Labyrinth Press in 1988. I suspect that this is one of the least read books among the many least read books I have published. I only note that reality because I would like to tempt more to read it because I feel that it is not only an entertaining book but one that might counter some of the standard objections to a position I am alleged to hold concerning the relation of the church and world.

2 Hauerwas, Stanley and Coles, Romand, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), p. 4Google Scholar.

3 The quoted phrase comes from Thomas Dumm's book, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 47. Dumm's comment concerning the ordinary is in criticism of Arendt's failure to attend to the ordinary.