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Reinventing Liberal Christianity. By Theo Hobson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2013. viii + 332 pp. $30.00 (cloth).
Stanley Hauerwas once compared the word "liberal" with the notion of "speed." The thrust of liberalism, Hauerwas noted, moves quickly over the particulars of human life and experience, relying on universal and ahistorical concepts to help produce the "liberal person," that is, a person who is
free from the constraints of absolute authority in politics, economics, and religion. What is natural for the liberal is to set spontaneity over law, the individual over community, and even spirit over the flesh. If liberalism is a tradition, it is one that never has time to settle.
Theo Hobson s Reinventing Liberal Christianity is an attempt to ground a liberal form of Christianity into something deeper than what Hauerwas critiques. As a project of reinvention, Hobson addresses two false moves that he argues have contributed to a confused status for liberal Christianity. First, there is the legacy of "bad" liberalism that Hobson associates with the ascendency of an uncritical rationalized humanism. Second, there is the "nostalgic fantasy" present in the arguments of Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others in the postliberal fold who see the liberal state as a source of corruption...