Selected by Christianity Today as one of the 100 most important books on religion of the twentieth century. Leading theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas shows how discussions of Christology and the authority of scripture involve questions about what kind of community the church must be to rightly tell the stories of God. He challenges the dominant assumption of contemporary Christian social ethics that there is a special relation between Christianity and some form of liberal democratic social system.
Community Character provides a design-oriented system for planning and zoning communities but accounts for how people who participate in a community live, work, and shop there. The relationships that Lane Kendig defines here reflect the complexity of the interaction of the built environment with its social and economic uses, taking into account the diverse desires of municipalities and citizens. Among the many classifications for a community’s “character” are its relationship to other communities, its size and the resulting social and economic characteristics. According to Kendig, most comprehensive plans and zoning regulations are based entirely on density and land use, neither of which effectively or consistently measures character or quality of development. As Kendig shows, there is a wide range of measures that define character and these vary with the type of character a community desires to create. Taking a much more comprehensive view, this book offers “community character” as a real-world framework for planning for communities of all kinds and sizes. A companion book, A Practical Guide to Planning with Community Character, provides a detailed explanation of applying community character in a comprehensive plan, with chapters on designing urban, sub-urban, and rural character types, using character in comprehensive plans, and strategies for addressing characteristic challenges of planning and zoning in the 21st century.
Some fourteen years after its initial publication, this important and influential book, with a new, substantial, and candid introduction by the author, is available in a reasonably priced paperback edition. In this volume Hauerwas assesses recent interest in the “ethics of character” and suggests areas in his own work that now call for some corrective and/or further work.
Highlights the key elements of the Catholic moral tradition and lays the foundations for Christian ethics through experiential reflections of right action toward persons, communities and personal choices.
A Guide to Planning for Community Character adds a wealth of practical applications to the framework that Lane Kendig describes in his previous book, Community Character. The purpose of the earlier book is to give citizens and planners a systematic way of thinking about the attributes of their communities and a common language to use for planning and zoning in a consistent and reliable way. This follow-up volume addresses actual design in the three general classes of communities in Kendig's framework-urban, suburban, and rural. The author's practical approaches enable designers to create communities "with the character that citizens actually want." Kendig also provides a guide for incorporating community character into a comprehensive plan. In addition, this book shows how to use community character in planning and zoning as a way of making communities more sustainable. All examples in the volume are designed to meet real-world challenges. They show how to design a community so that the desired character is actually achieved in the built result. The book also provides useful tools for analyzing or measuring relevant design features. Together, the books provide a comprehensive treatment of community character, offering both a tested theory of planning based on visual and physical character and practical ways to plan and measure communities. The strength of this comprehensive approach is that it is ultimately less rigid and more adaptable than many recent "flexible" zoning codes.
We like to think of ourselves and our friends and families as pretty good people. The more we put our characters to the test, however, the more we see that we are decidedly a mixed bag. Fortunately there are some promising strategies - both secular and religious - for developing better characters.
Stanley Hauerwas is one of today's greatest theologians, but like many of us, he is also a godparent. In this very special collection he invites us to share in fifteen letters to sent to his godson, Laurence Wells. Each letter, sent on the anniversary of Laurence’s baptism every year, distills years of self-reflection and religious thinking into heartfelt notes packed with wit, warmth and verve. The letters explore what makes a happy, fulfilled life: kindness, courage, humility, joy, friendship, simplicity, humour, generosity and faith. An introduction by Samuel Wells—Laurence’s father—tells the story behind these letters and offers insight into being a godparent.
This book provides the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological foundation that teachers, principals, professors, and students preparing for teaching will need in order to be informed and effective planners and evaluators of character education programs and good character educators. Through its clear definition of terms, review of Constitutional and public support, comparative analysis of philosophical approaches, synthesis of many relevant theories of child development, K-12 core curriculum, description of many instructional strategies, and methodology for program evaluation, this handbook effectively prepares prospective program planners and character educators to create comprehensive programs that are developmentally appropriate, adapted to the unique needs and characteristics of school communities, and soundly evaluated. Dr. Vessels presents a wide range of options, developmental and practical guidelines for choosing from among these options, and a creative core curriculum and evaluation technology that he hopes school community members will find useful for their particular school or system.
Today's planners use myriad tools and techniques to identify and protect what is special about their communities: historic preservation ordinances, improved sign controls, computerized viewshed protection regulations, tree-planting and landscaping requirements, cell tower controls, and more. As the level of preservation activity has increased dramatically, so has the number of court cases challenging aesthetic-based regulation.
Becoming Good: Building Moral Character (2000) is a study of character—the kind of people we are, our habits, dispositions, inclinations, virtues, and vices. Without good character we do not have the strength or wisdom to fight off temptation and do the right thing, no matter how good our principles may be. For this study Jesus’ Beatitudes are the primary guide, with Paul’s faith, hope, and love a close second. Becoming Good digs deep into the biblical text and vocabulary, listens to the great biblical and ethical teaching of the past two millennia, and provides abundant contemporary illustrations and applications. Becoming Good works as a stand-alone study (the ethics of “being,” virtue ethics), but it is also the companion to Doing Right (the ethics of “doing,” decision and action).
