Hauerwas is always challenging and thought-provoking. This work on Bonhoeffer is no different.

In Performing the Faith, Hauerwas uses Bonhoeffer's life to show how Christians can be creative in their practice of non-violence (of course, that's an extremely reductive summary). Here are some examples of the sort of brilliance you'll find:

"No account of the Christian life is adequate that ignores the beauty of God's creation as well as the beauty created in response to that creation we sometimes call art" (22).

"Good performers of the Christian faith, like good musicians, are those who have refined the art of allowing themselves to be played by the work even as they perform it" (102).

"The failure to live with humility, a failure common to Christian and non-Christian alike, results in a distorted understanding of the way things are" (127).

"Insights, even about the human condition, are a dime a dozen. People seldom, and rightly so, are willing to risk their lives or even make a small sacrifice on the basis of an 'insight'" (139).

I am a pacifist because I think nonviolence is the necessary condition for a politics not based on death" (201).

The most profound chapter in the book was his pacifist response to 9/11. For Hauerwas, the whole response to the terror attacks were derailed when President Bush first brought up the term "war". That galvanized and misled the entire response to date.

I do have one major frustration with this book, though. It's not about Bonhoeffer, and it's not one logical unit. It's a collection of essays of various levels of academic writing around the theme of non-violence. Bonhoeffer, whose picture and name grace the cover of the book, is only given a two-part essay comprising 39 pages.

Once you understand that, you can give your mind and heart a work-out with these incisive essays. ( )

While only the first two chapters deal specifically with Bonhoeffer's life and thought, the themes that Hauerwas undeaths in Bonhoeffer are present throughout the book. Hauerwas's interpretation of Bonhoeffer, is (predictably) similar to John Howard Yoder and himself in terms of how Hauerwas sees Bonhoeffer's conception of the church and nonviolence. However, this is certainly not a demerit. Many would-be interpreters of Bonhoeffer focus on his alleged association with the botched (..) assasination at the expense of the total body of his writings when attempting to explicate Bonohoeffer's perspective on nonviolence. Hauerwas rightly surmises that it is wrong to assume a major shift between Bonhoeffer's work and his life. As such Hauerwas allows Bonhoeffer's work to speak on its own terms without making facil attempts to "harmonize" Bonhoeffer's life with his theology. ( )

If the cover and subtitle of this book lead readers to expect a sustained engagement with Bonhoeffer, they will be disappointed. For better or worse, Hauerwas is an occasional writer; and this is another collection of the occasional pieces for which he is known, this one organized around a cluster of issues related to pacifism and “pacifist” response to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath. The collection does contain an engagement with Bonhoeffer, one that will prompt many readers to wish for a less contained, more sustained, engagement. Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas are natural allies on the matter of faithful performance; and the combination of Bonhoeffer, Hauerwas, and Yoder is a potentially revolutionary conversation. The conversation with Yoder has developed through many of Hauerwas’s occasional pieces. This collection (particularly the first part) is a tentative, fragmentary, and provocative beginning toward the inclusion of Bonhoeffer. Tentativeness, fragmentariness, and provocation are almost certainly what Hauerwas had in mind: they are consistent with his work, and they are certainly what readers familiar with it have come to expect.