Willimon and Hauerwas’s out-of-season words on pastoral care
Pastors coping with the pandemic need our encouragement, not our carping.
Read Willimon and Hauerwas’s conversation and Maria Russell Kenney’s response.
I read with interest the recent article by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon on the excesses of pastoral care. Any publication by these two wise men calls out for attention, and this one is no exception.
Much here I can happily affirm. We still live in a narcissistic culture, as Christopher Lasch termed it back in the 1970s, when Hauerwas, Willimon, and I were still youngsters. That culture seeps into the lives of church members and their pastors (and a fair number of seminary professors as well). Too often pastors say only what they think people want to hear and affirm judgments and practices that ought to be challenged. (Again, the same might be said about many seminary professors, including the one who appears in the mirror.)
