Stanley Hauerwas is a man of many gifts. These include wide and deep learning, passion about the issues of the day, a pastoral heart, a love of the Lord Jesus, and a puckish humor that permeates everything he does. Hauerwas has forged these gifts into a vocation as a daring, candid, imaginative ethicist in the service of the Gospel. All of these gifts are richly on exhibit in this book. In turn, the preacher in these sermons is critical, self-reflective, outrageous, passionate, and wise–all of the practices that constitute ‘Stanley Hauerwas’ which this writer performs so well. Beyond the sermons, the prayers show a vigorous faith. The concluding interviews are mesmerizing in Hauerwas’s capacity to make connections. The cumulative effort of it all is breathtaking–just what Stanley intends–or he would not be Stanley. –Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary Stanley Hauerwas is always full of insight, but it is a rare treat to hear him speaking in a relaxed mode. Here he steps away from argument and takes time to be awed by beauty, to love good books and good friends, to delight in marriage and grieve at death–and he does all that consciously in the presence of God. This is a wonderfully fresh book. –Ellen F. Davis, Professor of Bible and Practical Theology, Duke Divinity School By his own confession, Stanley Hauerwas loves being a theologian, loves to preach, and is learning to pray. This wise and winsome collection of Sunday sermons, wedding sermons, ordination sermons, eulogies, prayers, and interviews is a gift from these loves. Offered with the grace of confidence that Jesus is who the church proclaims him to be, these sundries take us to the edge of an extraordinary world–comic, just, and redeemed. And most of all, they take us to a place more real than real. Both singing above his work as a teacher and provocateur and revealing the beat of faith beneath it, they voice Stanley Hauerwas’s wonderful eloquence as a witness, a friend, an interlocutor, and a child of God. –Wesley Avram, Clement-Muehl Assistant Professor of Communication, Yale Divinity Scho