This is a quite exemplary interview with Stanley Hauerwas.  (It's also funny and telling that Toor did the interview in part because Hauerwas asked her to do so, as she lets drop.)  Hauerwas has been a major presence in my field across my whole career; I first saw him when I was 19 years old, and as sometimes happened in those days, some people walked out of his talk in outrage.  He loved that sort of thing--in a way he wanted it to happen.  He might say, you only know you're saying something if some people disagree with it so strenously as to walk out.  

This conversation is about his writing and about his work habits.  He's famous for being in his office by 7 AM every day (well, probably not Saturdays, and I doubt on Sundays).  He continues to write up a storm.  He probably publishes almost everything he writes, and he might have had a more profound (though not as widespread) influence if he had published less, and revised more.  But then again his influence--even on those who never write about him, who react against him--is pretty significant.  Everyone who thinks about writing, and about theological writing, can probably learn from him.

Perhaps the best piece I've ever read on Hauerwas--or the piece that gets closest to the heart of things--is this small review by Oliver O'Donovan of a book (by Nicholas Healy) about Hauerwas.  O'Donovan doesn't quite defend Hauerwas, but he does suggest that it's very difficult for contemporary academics like me to get clear on what he is actually trying to do:

What Healy offers us is a sketch of what Hauerwas might have been if he had been a dogmatic theologian. But Hauerwas's theology is from first to last practically oriented, aimed not at belief but at how Christians may conduct themselves. Not that he is uninterested in true belief, but his interest is focused on its inextricable relation to authentic action. So his distinctive contribution to theology begins when he writes of pacifism, the role of the disabled, the Church's power to resist liberal pluralism, and so on. Doctrinal debates about the attributes of God or the final reconciliation of all things do not engage him directly, though he will make use of what others have done with them. The Liberal Protestants of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were very directly engaged by them. Their aim was to reconstruct the dogmatic tradition on the basis of moral agreement, which Kantian philosophy seemed to place within their reach. This negotiation of the relation between doctrine and ethics is reversed by Hauerwas. Too much a man of our age to imagine that a general moral agreement can be had on any terms, he turns back to pursue the moral question in all seriousness, as one that requires an answer. Christian belief, he avows, is the indispensible condition for answering it.

To accommodate Hauerwas, the main theoretical alternatives open to Protestant thought, broadly summed up by Healy as "traditional" and "liberal", need to be extended by the addition of a third, which we may call, in a widened use of the term, "methodist". A cradle Methodist, Hauerwas has made no secret of regarding most of what passes under that name in America as the betrayal of an original inspiration, but that has not dampened his enthusiasm to recover the focus on holiness that the Wesleys bequeathed. In this pursuit he has drawn on very eclectic sources: the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, the Mennonite pacifism of John Howard Yoder (with both of whom he has had close and collaborative friendships), and among the giants of the past on Thomas Aquinas (selectively read) and on Karl Barth, to each of whom he has devoted whole books or major parts of books.

Healy's wily reconstruction of Hauerwas is a demonstration, if one more is required, that the modern academy is at a loss as to how to situate a disciplined reflection on practical reason. Hauerwas is famously critical of the paradigms of research and theory, as he is of that "bad idea", Ethics (understood as a pluralistic, sociological moment within a theoretically oriented theology), which has emerged to fit them. The deliberative focus of practical reason can only be misunderstood within such a matrix. He sometimes calls his work "political" theology - in a sense that subordinates the concerns of formal legal and parliamentary institutions to the mysterious dynamics of common consciousness that make a people a nation. But it can also be described as counter-political (one book was named Against the Nations, wittily turning Aquinas's title Summa Contra Gentiles to his own account), in that it finds these dynamics perilous to the human spirit. There is a strongly American focus to Hauerwas's interrogations of these matters. He is no internationalist, and the "liberalism" of which he complains is not precisely that which we find in critiques of modernity largely written in Europe, inspired as they mainly are by Augustine and routed through Heidegger. Hauerwas's voice is often that of the disheartened American intellectual reflecting on the platitudes of a populist, self-righteous and rather unpleasantly religious democratic nationalism.

…

With no other contemporary theologian do personality and conversational engagement count for so much. The occasional style leaves Hauerwas wide open to critique proposition by proposition - "plodding", as Healy describes it self-effacingly: dialectical concessions that had better not have been made, self-corrections not always acknowledged, loosely formulated arguments, generalizations so broad that they can hardly be defended. Finding these is the easy bit; more difficult, and more worthwhile is to capture what it is that Hauerwas has successfully given a generation of thinking and reading Christians, which a more formal theology could not offer. He has given them theology as a vehicle of liberating critical commentary on life in the modern world. Persistent dialectical energy and single-mindedness of focus, an eclectic attentiveness to the times and their bewilderments, have enabled his numerous readers to wrestle with their own context as they needed to. A generation has been shown what it is for theology to be wholly free, wholly urgent and wholly aware of what is going on around it, untrammelled by secondary academic restraints. And, above all, public.

I think there's a lot to think about in that review.  It's also one of O'Donovan's finest small pieces, fully exhibiting the intelligence infused by love for the particular person of Hauerwas, and as such it's magnificent.

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Now to shift gears somewhat: I've written on Hauerwas myself, a long time ago, and I would pretty much stand by what I said then.  (I've attached the piece below.)  A somewhat similar position is detailed (in much greater detail) in Jeffrey Stout's book Democracy and Tradition, which has not yet had the impact on theological discussion I wish it would have.  (Even as I disagree with it.)

Since writing my piece, I think a number of us have come to see Hauerwas's work as significantly darkened by the behavior of John Howard Yoder, one of his most profound influences.  Yoder engaged in a long pattern of sexual abuse against women,  which was covered up or shunted aside by the institutions that employed him.  Hauerwas's own response to Yoder's abuse seems open to questioning.  (Here's a piece with a lot of references and reflections on Hauerwas.)  And for me, it shows up one of the deepest weaknesses in Yoder's own work, which is an insufficient awareness of the need of institutions to protect themselves (and actual people) against their own over-reach, hypocrisy, and violence.  (I'm a Niebuhrian, so I would say that, of course.)

I hasten to add I'm not writing (I hope it's obvious) to condemn Hauerwas, or to dismiss his thinking; he remains a great inspiration to many, even in a small way to me, and someone whose intellectual generosity has been manifest across decades.    I continue to think his thinking, and his writing, reward the effort to get through them, and struggle with his arguments.  His honesty about confronting his failings in public--even if some don't think he does that as well as he could, and I probably agree with them--is rarer than it should be, though by now, East of Eden, we shouldn't be quite so "shocked, shocked" as we are by the paucity of our own self-criticism, and our failures when we attempt it at all.