"[34], Hart's first major work, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), an adaptation of his doctoral thesis, received acclaim from the theologians John Milbank, Janet Soskice, Paul J. Griffiths, and Reinhard Htter. I confess that I have of late struggled not so much with my commitment to Christ, who remains the great love of my life, but with my specifically Christian identity. Thousands of paid subscribers Leaves in the Wind Among his signal contributions to the popular understanding of these matters is the clear distinction he insists upon between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness, the former being those of the psychological and physiological structures and processes associated with mental events, the latter being that of the phenomenal character "[59], In February 2022, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (in collaboration with the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University) invited Hart to deliver a public homily for the Sunday of the Publican & the Pharisee as part of their Orthodox Scholars Preach series. in Theology from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. Among his signal contributions to the popular understanding of these matters is the clear distinction he insists upon between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness, the former being those of the psychological and physiological structures and processes associated with mental events, the latter being that of the phenomenal character Webdavidbentleyhart .substack .com. Obsessed with learning. But my hunch is that those same people, stoked into compassion by their own lives as strangers and exiles, may generally be who is left at the end of this centurys promised tumult to keep the apocalyptic dream alive. Next. : A Review of David Bentley Hart's Case for Universal Salvation", "Book list for author Addison Hodges Hart", "Receiving the World Like Children: Next-Day Reflections on an Evening Stolen from (and Graciously Given by) David Hart", "David Bentley Hart, David Gornoski on the Politics of Jesus, Socialism, Property Ethics", "Comment at bottom: God is not Odin, God is not Zeus, God is not Marduk", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Bentley_Hart&oldid=1142840713, writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian, Robert Louis Wilken (on dissertation committee), 2011 Michael Ramsey Prize by the Archbishop of Canterbury for, This page was last edited on 4 March 2023, at 17:28. Webdavidbentleyhart .substack .com. Perhaps, here, Sophie's World meets Alice through the Looking-Glass, or Don Quixote meets The Wind in the Willows. [41], Roland in Moonlight was chosen by A.N. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 07. At first I thought that this was another one of his provocations. His short stories have been described as "Borgesian" and are elaborate metaphysical fables, full of wordplay, allusion, and structural puzzles. David Artman August 4, 2021. Please email comments to [emailprotected] and join the conversation on our Facebook page. On days where I do not think very much of myselfso, most daysthose voices are profound to me; on days where I struggle, in the third year of a pandemic that has seen several changes in religious community for me and my family and that has witnessed the decline of regular attendance at liturgy for me and that is now beginning to witness a real loss of desire and energy for prayer between vocational and domestic work and the rat race of trying to sketch out a decent future for my child in the hellscape of the contemporary world, those voices are practically all that I can hear blaring in my ears when I dare to call myself a Christian. But Harry, unlike Roland, is both beneath and above language: too stupid to recognize words, too wise to bother with them. He has two brothers: Addison Hodges Hart (also an author)[83][84] and Fr. Commonweal's latest, delivered twice weekly. "[42][43], In 2022, the Catholic Media Association awarded a first place prize to Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale) in the category of Escapism for authors from other traditions. (A Gnostic Tale) In statements like these, some readers see a shift from the idea of Christianity as a unique divine invasion of history to just one more religion among others. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. Even here, Harts style is consistent with his theology. control, salvation, recapitulation, the crucified Christ, David Bentley Hart, and eschatological tension. $22.95 | 434 pp. But yeah, the book is about Christian universalismabout not only its history, but its logic. This assent is hard-won for me. (This, according to the theopolitics of Kenogaia, is impossible, and, worse, illegal.) What is the purpose of human existence? But yeah, the book is about Christian universalismabout not only its history, but its logic. I take this view, however, to be continuous with the view of tradition provided Newman, but also the Tbingen School of Mhler and Drey, not forgetting Blondel. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 See all Please. Professor Hart was a Directors Fellow and a Templeton Fellow in residence at the NDIAS. WebSelf As Lab | David Hart | Substack About Self As Lab I have always been curious. that at the macroscopic level Christianity as a whole has demonstrated throughout its history, raising the question of how it might be a single tradition at all. I prefer to think of myself more as a scholar of religious studies, by the way, than a theologianand there are a lot of people who would prefer I call myself that, as well. It builds off a series of columns Hart began to write during the middle of the previous decade, in which he has a long series of conversationsabout cognition, about the Beatles, about the ontological primacy of spiritwith his dog, Roland. David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style. I long for the day, however, when I can return to my posture of airily insouciant disdain for the whole system and can again cast votes only for hopeless third party candidates with a clear conscience. Support our work today!]. Oct 21, 2021 On Christian Freedom and Capitalism - David Bentley Hart The employment of the will, if it's truly to be free, can never be severed from intellect as a knowledge of what it is you're seeking. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3) Listen now (37 min) | The invention of digital scarcity. Read in the Substack app. And in our day, when various Christianities are dying or doubling-down on institutionalisms, ideologies, and in some cases autocracies, all while hemorrhaging people, a vision of what it is to be Christian continually drawing forward to the future with the presents priority placed on people and not on ideas will be fundamental. [52] Gerald McDermott criticized Hart's book Tradition and Apocalypse in July 2022 for "a gnostic reading of Genesis and heterodox views of Christology, creation, and salvation. Some readers will dislike the books whimsicality and excesses, but Rolands digressions on the mind-cosmos relationship make these a small price to pay. 0:00. Thank you, David, for this reflection. This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. WebDavid Bentley Hart 600 Paperback 38 offers from $7.21 That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation David Bentley Hart 632 Paperback 52 offers from $11.31 The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss David Bentley Hart 324 Paperback 47 offers from $8.49 Editorial Reviews From the Back Cover Email. It's Good (feat. Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved was published on September 24, 2019, and makes the case that universalism is the only coherent version of the Christian faith. WebDavid Bentley Hart may be reached at dhart4@nd.edu. During the 20142015 academic year, Hart was Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University in the Department of Theological Studies. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 2/3) Listen now (40 min) | Government-issued fiat money is destroying your life's work. There is no Realer Real hiding in bare nouns and verbs behind the scrim of our perceptions and feelings. His translation in collaboration with John R. Betz of Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm by Erich Przywara was published in 2014 by Eerdmans. [12][13] Hart's friendship and substantial intellectual common ground with John Milbank has been noted several times by both thinkers. He exposes his opponents errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision.[40], Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian in January 2014, praised Hart's book The Experience of God as "the one theology book all atheists really should read". This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. Devouring everything I can trying to "level up", to understand myself and this world better, to edge an advantage, to try and shine a light slightly further down the tunnel of where life might go. What follows is my own open letter in response. Ep. Roland in Moonlight is too strange, entertains too many important questions, and is written with too palpable a love for Harts family and his dog not to command the attention of philosophically inclined readers. You have to ask yourself, "Whose more free, the person who knows what it is that he's seeking or the person who doesn't?" -52:26. So the writer may as well use whatever comes to hand. Open app. As literary influences, Hart and others have noted Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. I am starting a subscription newsletter on Substack, dedicated to all the topics that fascinate me, in all the genres in which I typically write. [56][57], Although there are accusations of heterodoxy from some of Hart's Christian critics, especially after his 2019 publication of That All Shall Be Saved, a variety of prominent Christian scholars with strong commitments to traditional Christianity praised the book. In an essay titled "A Person You Flee at Parties: Donald and the Devil" (about Donald Trump from May 6, 2011, for First Things), Hart concluded: Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trumpthough perhaps just a little nicer. He revealed his socialism, perhaps more offensive to many American Christians than even his universalism. Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale) David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $22.95 | 434 pp. Facebook 0 David Artman September 15, 2021. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. Angelico Press If Harts corpus were to be compared with that of Origens, then Tradition and Apocalypse is easily his Book IV of the De Principiis: the articulation of a comprehensive exegetical method not simply for reading Christian texts but the fact of Christianity itself. Personally, I would like as many walls of citations standing between us and hell as possible. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recent review, at Public Discourse, of his book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature . What follows is my own open letter in response. More fundamentally, some longtime readers of Hart wonder what he is driving at. 108 David Bentley Hart responds to claims of heresy by Fr. "[58] Archbishop Alexander Golitzin of the Orthodox Church in America recorded a public interview on January 14, 2022, in which he named Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved and said that it "draws upon some very prominent and worthy and holy teachers" in the early church who held that the "love of God will ultimately overcome the capacity of the creature to say no to God." Next. ", This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. I would take it that Christs incarnation is that historically novel event that anchors the symbols in something besides the imagination. For many of us, there are varieties of Christianity that we would sooner lose our faith than adoptthe Christ of the Westboro Baptist Church, e.g., is so corrupted that one is nearer to God almost anywhere elsebut people rarely put the point as straightforwardly as Hart does, and in a way that suggests a personal and possibly shifting ranking of religions. 60 Dr. Thomas Senor - Christian Philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas, and editor of the academic journal Faith and Philosophy. What, exactly, is David Bentley Harts deal? the work raises for mean earlier draft of this review had, for example, a rather extended section on the historical Jesus and the question of how, given what we can reasonably say about who Jesus was on the basis of what data we have about his life, a futurist orientation towards the apocalyptic meaning of tradition affects not only our delayed sense of eschatology but even more basic concepts like what it is for Jesus to be messiah, a category that was a live one in his own day but, in the 21st century, has theological purchase with an absolute minority of world Jews; I had also intended some comments about the ecclesiological virtues of Christian communions like, say, Anglicanism which are committed to the idea of eventually disappearing as discrete structures into a supervening ecumenical unity in the future, and the possibility Hart treats towards the end that Christianity itself might find its inner rational coherence better explained by contextualization in another religious tradition altogether, or minimally with other religious traditionsbut they are possibilities that proceed from this basic sympathy with its argument and probably distractions on the whole from the real crux of the matter, which is that you should read the book. One asks the question in awe. Thanks for your clear and short review. 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. Facebook. All rights reserved. Twitter. Harry had no opinions about Harts books, but the desperate, even anguished goodwill that is permanently fixed on his facethe kind of goodwill that would make a perfect person die for an imperfect onehad an eloquence of its own. David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $24.95 | 386 pp. [62][63] As "exemplars" in writing English prose, Hart has noted: Robert Louis Stevenson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, J. I prefer to think of myself more as a scholar of religious studies, by the way, than a theologianand there are a lot of people who would prefer I call myself that, as well. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. Design by. Published in the October 2022 issue: View Contents Tags Books Theology Fiction Phil Christman is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of Midwest Futures. [46][47] Hart responded on a few of the points, including on the Eclectic Orthodoxy blog and with his essay "The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients" in Notre Dame's Church Life Journal. Ep. 2023 Commonweal Magazine. There will never, for instance, be a revival in Europe on any appreciable scale of a Christianity with impermeable boundaries; but there might be a revival of the faith in a form better able to stand amid the religions of the world without terror or hostility, and better able freely to draw upon them to understand its own depths and range. (She keeps having to glue Our Lady back together.) The religious system of Kenogaia resembles those varieties of orthodox Christianity that Hart rejects. davidbentleyhart.substack.com. And ornateness is just Harts mode, anyway; one might as well fault Kraftwerk for using computers. FREE PREVIEW. WebA reader of David Bentley Hart's Substack informed me of a post where he engages in his usual bilious attacks and misrepresentations. In The Experience of God (2014) he wrote about his admiration for Vedanta in particular, which he now says he prefers to several popular strains of Western Christianity. Facebook 0 David Artman September 15, 2021. If Harts corpus were to be compared with that of Origens, then. 13. David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style. Ep. This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. Email. WebFoliis tantum ne carmina manda, ne turba volent rapidis ludibria ventis Click to read Leaves in the Wind, by David Bentley Hart, a Substack publication with thousands of readers. Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recent review, at Public Discourse, of his book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature . St. Gregory of Nyssa), Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Maximus the Confessor, Isaac of Nineveh, Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, St. Symeon the New Theologian, Nicholas of Cusa, St. John of the Cross, St. Bonaventure, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant, William Blake, Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Dostoevsky, George MacDonald, Nietzsche, Pavel Florensky, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Rowan Williams, Rumi, Ramanuja, Shankara, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Animism, Bah, Dharmic religions (esp. Copy link. Or, to put the matter differently, its roots go back that far and even to a few years before that. Angelico Press 5 Among American theologians, Hart has called Robert Jenson the theologian with whom it is most profitable to struggle.[69], More broadly, Hart has also noted many other influences and inspirations (some of whom he can also criticize severely in certain respects): Paul,[70] Origen, Plotinus, Proclus, Desert Fathers, Cappadocian Fathers (esp. David Bentley Hart And that, however much Harts belief (like anyones) may fluctuate, Christ still rushes at him with the same canine enthusiasm. If Harts corpus were to be compared with that of Origens, then Tradition and Apocalypse is easily his Book IV of the De Principiis: the articulation of a comprehensive exegetical method not simply for reading Christian texts but the fact of Christianity itself. David Bentley Harts 2022 You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature shows that the debate is alive and by no means merely academic and inconsequentialpantheism, tradition, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy are all very much at stake in the argument. In response to outcries from former fans, Hart insists that he is a basically consistent writer who has merely shifted his emphasis on certain points. Tradition and Apocalypse, published earlier this year, insists that there is no single deposit of tradition that Christians should strive to recover; we are faithful to something far beyond us, not behind us. by david bentley hart baker academic, 208 pages, $24.99 David Bentley Hart was once the darling of postliberal theologians for his brilliant books on divine beauty and the illogic of atheism. This is, if Ive understood it correctly, one of several arguments he makes in The Beauty of the Infinite. [31][32][33] His book Roland in Moonlight has a largely autobiographical framework while consisting primarily of dialogs with his dog Roland (pictured here) as well as accounts of his fictional great uncle Aloysius Bentley (1895-1987). (My other cat, Lila, prefers physics.) Such concepts as memory and object permanence he shows as the corrupting fictions they are: they prevent us from rightly celebrating the miracle of any persons mere presence. Being is expressed as fully in its train of effects, its little ripples and frills, the words that rise to consciousness long after it passes by us, as anywhere else. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 2/3) Listen now (40 min) | Government-issued fiat money is destroying your life's work. I see the Spirit at work in their lives, and I see Christ's grace and mercy showing up consistently like springs of water in hard, dry places. He has always been at least as concerned with the re-enchantment of the world, by any spiritual means necessary, as with Christian theology itself. Let me explain. In the last decade, I have belonged, in a serious way, to every major Christian communion, especially to Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism; in the latter two, despite a strong desire to make them work, I found that my life in community and the real obstacles I was facing to it were both predicated on my near-perennially expressed commitment to institutions and concepts of authority that, apart from being incoherent, were simply irrelevant to the real challenges of making religion work for something other than my own ego, during the pandemic, and in the generally secularizing world of the second and early third decades of the twenty-first century. David Artman August 4, 2021. Next. WebA reader of David Bentley Hart's Substack informed me of a post where he engages in his usual bilious attacks and misrepresentations. Hart also maintains a subscription newsletter called Leaves in the Wind that features original essays and conversations with other writers such as Rainn Wilson, China Miville, Tariq Goddard, and Salley Vickers. Unafraid conversations about anything. $24.95 | 386 pp. I show his arguments are fallacious. Next. Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale) David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $22.95 | 434 pp. David Artman August 4, 2021. [48][49] Peter Leithart wrote a critical response to Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved called "Good God?" John Milbank in an April 2022 conversation with Hart about You Are Gods said we agree that in fact neoplatonism and Vedanta and Islamic mysticism are monistic and that, actually, an emanationism, a monotheism, these are actually the more monistic visions and that, if weve got all these things in Christianity like Trinity, incarnation, grace and deification and so on, these arent qualifying monism. Instead, Milbank said that Hart's book You Are Gods shows that Christianity is spelling out or expounding monism and monotheism. For example, people are kept in line by the threat of an eternal hell. Thousands of paid subscribers Leaves in the Wind Departing from the spiritual elitism of some Gnostic writers, Hart makes it clear that none of his characters are merely physical: everyone we have met throughout the novel, it turns out, is a spark of the divine, including several distinctly dislikable characters. Like you, I've wrestled with a fair amount of self-doubt, but I've always been pulled back to center by the people I love and serve. The New Testament: A Translation was published in 2017 with Yale University Press (and a 2nd edition in 2023). We have to draw some kind of working distinction between the perpetually valid symbol and the historically novel event, he remarks late in Roland in Moonlight (2021). This is only the first posting, and yet this Substack page is about forty years old. [61], Hart has cited a wide variety of inspirations and influences in his writing as well as across his various areas of scholarship in religious studies, philosophy of mind, and Christian metaphysics. It becomes an extended argument against philosophical materialism, prosecuted, successfully, by Roland, who must often pause to explain his more startling apothegms to his slower-witted companion. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. Ep. [77] In his book You Are Gods, Hart also describes variations of both dualism and monism that he calls grim and monstrous: An absolute dualism, of course, is a very grim thing indeed; but a narrative monism unqualified by any hint of true gnostic detachment, irony, sedition, or doubtby any proper sense, that is, that the fashion of this world is horribly out of joint, that we are prisoners of delusion, that not every evil can be accounted for as part of divine necessityturns out to be at least as monstrous. Harts case against fideism (the term that appears late in the book as something of a replacement for Blondels extrinsicism to denote those who believe for beliefs sake, or who submit to the authority of institutions uncritically on the grounds of some perceived antiquity or self-referential continuity; to some extent, this might be the ideological equivalent for this book to what infernalism was in, ) is one that the reader should follow by reading it and can only really internalize by doing so; summarizing it here would both rob the reader of the experience as well as cheapen the argument itself. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 2/3) Listen now (40 min) | Government-issued fiat money is destroying your life's work. Or, to put the matter differently, its roots go back that far and even to a few years before that. David Hart Oct 30, 2022 08. I have picked at the book and may end up reading it, but Hart seems to be off-balance of late. In struggling, I am only listening sincerely to the freely expressed attitudes of many of the dearest friends that I have made in the Orthodox and Catholic worlds: that my inability or unwillingness to compromise either my learned canons of critical thinking or the mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being of the people closest and most special to me, whose love makes life meaningful, in the name of upholding the antiquity or the orthodoxy of institutions for whom I am at best a nameless asset and at worst a nameless threat signifies that I have no real Christian conviction at all. Then he placed those universalist cards on the table. 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. Tradition and Apocalypse was no doubt prompted by Cyril O'Regan's response to Hart's contribution in the festschrift, "Exorcising Philosophical Modernity," edited by Philip John Paul Gonzales and published two years prior to Hart's book. [6] His translation of the New Testament was published by Yale in 2017[7][8][9][10] with a 2nd edition in 2023. WebWe would like to show you a description here but the site wont allow us. Unafraid conversations about anything. 13. He has every reason to sympathize with Gnosticism, since his labored breathing and malingering digestive system very literally represent the handiwork of a malign demigodthe upper-class English dog-breeder, who in his arrogance and folly has saddled Harry with these very problems as the conditions of his existence. I have no critiques of Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no. As I slouch towards forty, this means far more to me than it once did. You have to ask yourself, "Whose more free, the person who knows what it is that he's seeking or the person who doesn't?" But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. A. Baker, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Vladimir Nabokov.[64]. davidbentleyhart.substack.com. Hart's academic books include The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Wm. I found it entertaining and clever in many places, and illuminating in the way that it fits so many of Harts spiritual and intellectual concerns into a single framework. Ep. Not long after this, his father is arrested by a pack of lycanthropic civil servants. (Something of the sort worked well enough in the empire of Graeco-Roman late antiquity or the empire of Kublai Khan.) His translation of the New Testament highlighted the discordances between its various writers and the alienness of its conceptual backgroundperhaps accurately, for all I know, but most people are surprised if you tell them that Pauls great theological concern is not justification but thwarting evil angels. Roland in Moonlight taylormertins.substack.com. In struggling, I am only listening sincerely to the freely expressed attitudes of many of the dearest friends that I have made in the Orthodox and Catholic worlds: that my inability or unwillingness to compromise either, or the mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being of the people closest and most special to me, whose love makes life meaningful, in the name of upholding the antiquity or the orthodoxy of institutions for whom I am at best a nameless asset and at worst a nameless threat signifies that I have no real Christian conviction at all. Oct 21, 2021 On Christian Freedom and Capitalism - David Bentley Hart The employment of the will, if it's truly to be free, can never be severed from intellect as a knowledge of what it is you're seeking. Is it important to hire Catholic intellectuals at Catholic universities? At the age of 18, Hart moved from high-church Anglicanism to join the Orthodox tradition and is asked to serve and contribute by leaders in his church tradition such as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Roman Catholic scholar Robert Louis Wilken wrote that "in this original and lively book, Hart shows, why most Christian thinking about eternal damnation is unbiblical," and Orthodox Christian scholar John Behr described the book as "a brilliant treatment exegetically, theologically, and philosophically of the promise that, in the end, all will indeed be saved, and exposing the inadequacy above all moral of claims to the contrary.