![]() He rejected the “ahistorical approach of liberal theory,” the assumption that each individual is an autonomous economic unit with a view from nowhere. Hauerwas, as it happened, was also from Dallas the son of a bricklayer, he could speak in the academic argot of a virtue ethicist or the salty style of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. One afternoon, she wandered into a lecture by Stanley Hauerwas, a divinity-school professor whom Time had just named America’s “best” theologian. She had grown up in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and spent most summers in Dallas with her wealthy churchgoing grandmother. When Leah Hunt-Hendrix was an undergraduate at Duke, in the early two-thousands, she wasn’t sure what to do with her privilege. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures. Or you could just give it all away-to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk-which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. ![]() If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time-enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style-and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world.
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