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I’ve worked my way through Stanley Hauerwas and Rom Coles new book, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Cascade, 2008). Not only does Rom Coles offer Christians a different vision of politics and democracy with so many possibilities, I also think he brings out the best in Hauerwas. I wanted to offer some of the wonderful lines from Coles in the book, but they are endless—it’s hard to choose. Instead, I’ll quote some lines from Hauerwas—this is the best I’ve heard from Hauerwas in a while. It’s from the dialogue at the end of the book, page 334:

Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you.