Stanley, Did You Really Say That?

How much should a memoirist tell?

I remember Jennifer Holberg asking that question to Rhoda Janzen and Thomas Lynch at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing last year. Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, spoke sadly about how her portrayals of some family members had caused lots of pain. Lynch, the funeral director-poet-essayist best known for The Undertaking, said he waits for people to die before writing about them (which only seems fitting for a man in his line of work) and has managed to avoid stepping on toes.

I just finished reading Hannah’s Child: A Theologian's Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, who was named “America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, has long had a reputation for being provocative. As a result of his philosophical and theological convictions about honesty, he’s written a bracing memoir unlike any I’ve ever read. Consider these lines:

“Mother was a pain in the ass.”

“Dick’s way of going about things made it appear that his true interest was in being the first president of Roman Catholicism in America.”

“Dennis had nothing he wanted to do other than be the dean.”

It is compelling reading as he details his first wife’s mental illness or tells the inside story of faculty battles at Notre Dame and Duke, but at times I felt like I was slowing down to gawk at a traffic accident. What is the difference between transparency and too much information? Or, as Hauerwas himself puts it on the last page of the book, “between a loving but honest description and cruelty?”

One of the things I learned about Hauerwas is that he came from a long line of bricklayers and joined his father “on the job” when he was seven or eight years old. It’s a long way from being a poor bricklayer in Texas to places like Yale and Duke, and the pages of Time magazine. In previous encounters with Hauerwas, I've felt like he had a chip on his shoulder, and now that I know his story I have a better sense of the complex forces that drive him.

He owes a great deal to Ernest Hemingway, both stylistically, for his staccato sentences (“Paula is a great reader. Much of the time we share is spent reading. We both love murder mysteries.”) and his macho manner. Stanley is without a doubt combative, which seems like an odd thing to say about a pacifist. He is also funny, brilliant, complex, engaging, overbearing (after all, the preface is called “On Being Stanley Hauerwas”) and someone who has been right on just about every major issue of our time. For example, in Time in 2003 he wrote this about the Iraq War, “Bush’s religious rhetoric … tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.”

I recommend the book, if you are interested in theology and what makes an uncompromising theologian tick. But every time you cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.