Stanley Hauerwas, Jesus Changes Everything (Plough Publishing), 2025.
Review by Bradley Jersak
In prayer and meditation, I have given this month to asking the Lord, “Show me where I am being tempted to despair and where I am being invited to despair.”
In the current Great Regression—social, political, and religious—I am recognizing both aspects. First, the temptation to despair speaks of hopelessness, despondency, paralysis, and gloom. Many, especially vulnerable folks on the margins, feel afraid, under assault, traumatized. Despair lurks.
But conversely, I also sense Jesus inviting us to a despair of a different register. I suspect we should despair of imagining we can fix our world, our nation, and even the Christian brand through worldly ways via partisan politics, culture wars ideology, and religious nationalism. These have proven ineffectual and have increasingly mutated Christianity into something foreign to the Jesus Way.
What then? Enter Stanley Hauerwas. For a long time, he’s being urging the followers of Christ to be “resident aliens,” where the church is not trying to “take the seven mountains” of cultural influence and certainly not to found a theocracy as a political power. But neither is Hauerwas calling us into a Christian conclave as lumps of tasteless salt and bucket covered lamps.
In Jesus Changes Everything, Hauerwas asks us to despair of cultural control and political power. Like Jeremiah, we are not citizens of the empire, but strangers from another world, planted wherever we live as yeast in the loaf. In only that way, “a new world is possible.”
In this tight (133 pages and just $10), clear manifesto, the author reorients us to Jesus, in six movements as simple that they are radical and provocative.
- Part 1: Following Jesus
- Part 2: Good News
- Part 3: God’s Alternative Society
- Part 4: Kingdom Economics
- Part 5: Sowing Seeds of Peace
- Part 6: The Politics of Witness
Hauerwas makes it hard to be a Christian (because, of course, basics such as radical forgiveness and enemy love involve a kind of death to self), and he makes it hard to not to be one, as the person of Jesus and his story are intensely compelling. This book shows us how Jesus’ story can be my story, our story, and from that center, trust the ripples. A keeper.
Here is an interview with Dr. Hauerwas about the book (with Charles Moore of Plough Publishing).
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