It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce the publication of Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections by Stanley Hauerwas with Robert J. Dean by Cascade Books.  The book is currently available for purchase through Wipf and Stock and in the days ahead will be available through many of your favorite book-sellers.

To celebrate the publication of the book, I have created a special Minding the Web page here on the blog, where you can find out more about the book, read the endorsements by Brian Brock, David Fitch, and Michael Pasquarello III, and where you can find links to all of the quotes and excerpts that I have published on the blog up until this point.

The cover both reflects both Hauerwas’s own understanding of theology as a “web” and my own, perhaps somewhat fanciful, elucidation of this theme in the introduction to the book.  Here’s a brief excerpt from that introduction:

“Although Hauerwas’s brick-laying analogies are perhaps better known, his metaphor of theology as a web, first introduced in Sanctify Them in the Truth, has risen to a place of particular prominence in his recent work. It turns out that if we are to understand Hauerwas in his own terms, we must think of him as a kind of Spider-Man. While awe-struck readers might be tempted to think of him as effortlessly swinging between skyscrapers bearing the names of Barth, Aquinas, MacIntyre, and Wittgenstein, skimming across the rooftops of countless other more humble structures, it is more in keeping with Hauerwas’s own self-understanding to see him scurrying across the surface of the web, diligently working to repair, discover, and make articulate the connections necessary for Christians faithfully to make their way in the world. The web is not constructed from ideational building blocks, rather its strands emerge organically from the totality of the reality of the world created and redeemed through the Word enfleshed in Jesus.”¹