David Burrell of Notre Dame University, in the foreword to The Peaceable Kingdom (and a foreword that warmed me up quite nicely to dive in)

[Hauerwas’ argument is] a thoroughly Catholic argument, in that sense which transcends “Roman” and increasingly includes Protestants who would participate in a long-standing tradition, For it locates the self firmly within a community, shaped in its freedom by the language and practices of that community, learning how to follow Jesus by continued schooling in that community’s response. Moreover, it traces that response as the bishops first of South and now of North America have indicated: to Jerusalem, where Jesus confronts the powers of this world. It is a world comprised of those, including
So the primary task of those who would make Jesus’ story theirs is to
stand within that world–their world –witnessing to a peaceable
Kingdom which reflects the right understanding of that very world.
Such a stance wilt make stringent demands on those who would
so follow Jesus. Much as Gandhi saw that a policy of satyagraha would
require communities whose way of life would comprise training in
nonviolent resistance, so Hauerwas argues for a church which could
form its members in the virtues of patience and hope, as well as the capacity rightly to discriminate in particular situations. Again, it
not rules so much as practices which will guide us here: practices embodied in a community and justified through the continuing efforts
of such a group to live up to its convictions. A new form of casuistry, if you will, and one which fleshes out the mini-narratives which characterized that phase of Catholic moral teaching, to make the process that much more formative in the lives of those who would follow Jesus– to Jerusalem.

Patience, with hope, will indeed be the virtues needed to grow up into the reality of a community witnessing to the peaceable kingdom. And here Hauerwas carries our appreciation of the virtues some steps further than his earlier writings. He makes explicit here how these are developed in relation with other persons. The peace that we can know, with ourselves, is the fruit of forgiving others, and forgiving others requires a context of truthfulness which assists us in shedding our illusions, Since that description could hardly characterize the world in which we live, it must depict the community we would form in the likeness of the kingdom Jesus preached and
embodied.
In pursuing that task, moreover, we come to experience the joy associated with doing the one thing that is true! This fact adumbrates yet another dimension to the virtues of patience and hope: how they prepare us to live by the truth. Aquinas knew it as the contemplative life, and his teaching on the virtues required for living an active Christian life culminates in their predisposing us to contemplation.
The final pages of this exercise in understanding the Christian life do the same. For patience and hope assume the place they do in the program Hauerwas outlines for us, not simply because they help us to
cope with the tragic gap between the world in which we stand and
the kingdom to which we would witness. That they do, but they do
so only because they are also at work to attune us to the reality of that world and that kingdom. If they empower us to confront evil, within and without, by nonviolent resistance, that is because they are also teaching us how to contemplate that truth which promises to make us free.

David B. Burrell C.S.C.