0:00. Although it loosely follows some storylinesRolands discovery of texts by Harts pagan uncle Aloysius; Harts struggle with near-fatal illness; the gradual revelation that all human evolution has been guided by dogsits main interest is in the development of ideas and characters through talk. This is only the first posting, and yet this Substack page is about forty years old. What follows is my own open letter in response. [38][39] It was also praised by the agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny in The Times Literary Supplement: Hart has the gifts of a good advocate. We can play games with it, but any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately reducible to a monism.[76]. Otherworlds" with David Bentley Hart Of his longer fictions, Roland in Moonlight is the strangest, and the most accomplished. Or, to put the matter differently, its roots go back that far and even to a few years before that. The religious system of Kenogaia resembles those varieties of orthodox Christianity that Hart rejects. [86][87] During a September 16, 2022 conversation with Rainn Wilson, Hart shared briefly about an indescribable past experience of his own on Mount Athos: I was in this state of spiritual despair, and I also had an encounter. 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. DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no. Roland in Moonlight depends less on dramatic structure, but I still could have used about a hundred fewer pages of it. Nevertheless, your point is well-taken. Trumps authoritarian threat: this time it [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. Ep. Even in The Devil and Pierre Gernet, the most perfectly shaped of his stories, the ending arrives only after one has grown restive and fidgety. David Bentley Hart [Like what you're reading? If Harts corpus were to be compared with that of Origens, then. But the question What is David Bentley Harts deal? 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. Which dualism? 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. "[36], In 2020, Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest was named Best Religion Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Frankly, it is only something like Harts take on tradition that allows for ambiguity, exploration, discovery, and nuance in theology at all, since it is only a notion of tradition that is based on the concept of ongoing, unfolding revelation consummated in the eschatological future that can broker the possibility that Christianitys ultimate meaning is not straightforward or obvious, especially as considered historically, only intelligible from the vantage of the theandrocosmic love that is its endgame. By letting civility happen, we take better care not only of others and of the world itself, but of ourselves. 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. Reading his nonfiction alongside his fictionwhich includes The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories (2012), The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla (2019), and the two books considered here, Roland in Moonlight and Kenogaia (both 2021)has made it clear to me that he wasnt kidding. 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. "[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. ne turba volent rapidis ludibria ventis Rananim Now: Lawrencian Musings on Anti-Machine Theology, This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. 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. Hart's academic books include The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Wm. 5 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. Hart is a master rhetorician, but I would much prefer O'Regan's studious and careful approach to tradition and history than Hart's impatient and bombastic approach. Eschatological Horizons" with David Bentley Hart - Substack Obsessed with learning. 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?" 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. David Bentley Hart Trumps authoritarian threat: this time it This steady output of often provocative essays have appeared in First Things (2003 to 2020),[23] The New Atlantis,[24] Commonweal, Aeon, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other periodicals. More recently, in reaction to integralist efforts to restart that Christianization through brutal exertions of the will, he writes: [T]o my mind a truly Christian society would be one whose skyline would be crowded not only with churches, but with synagogues, temples, mosques, viharas, torii, gudwaras, and so on. David Bentley Hart Ornateness is just Harts mode, anyway; one might as well fault Kraftwerk for using computers. [17], Hart has authored eighteen books and produced two translated works. taylormertins.substack.com. 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. WebDavid Bentley Hart may be reached at dhart4@nd.edu. 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. It isnt only Harts view of the world that has been consistent. [18][19][20][21][22], Since the late 1990s, Hart has published hundreds of essays on varied subjects including Don Juan, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Segalen, Leon Bloy, William Empson, David Jones, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1893), and baseball. David Bentley Harts prodigious mind and imagination has given us just such a book. 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". 3 2 3 likes Community Aurelian is a political science prof at Indiana University in Bloomington. But I saw all this a little more clearly in Harry because I had read so much of Rolandand of Hart. Professor Hart was a Directors Fellow and a Templeton Fellow in residence at the NDIAS. FREE PREVIEW. $22.95 | 434 pp. He revealed his socialism, perhaps more offensive to many American Christians than even his universalism. Share this post. What does one say about an oeuvre marked by genius, charity, the love of Christ, and also in places by wooly-mindedness, spite, ego, acedia? Hello David, 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. Facebook. Facebook 0 David Artman September 15, 2021. But I suspect I will die before that day comes. The reviewer despairs. Facebook 0 David Artman September 15, 2021. -52:26. Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. There is much to be said for an institutional Christianity that places less faith in itself and in its own story and more faith in Jesus Christ's uncanny ability to transfigure every self and to resurrect every story. (This, according to the theopolitics of Kenogaia, is impossible, and, worse, illegal.) Twitter. B. Eerdmans, 2003), The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013), The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017), That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019), Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame Press. 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. By the way, his attention to Newman and Blondel also derives from O'Regan's response: "My essays on tradition directly involve a metaxological supplement to the notion of tradition as defined by a grammar, which in my view is just another way of speaking of analogy. FREE PREVIEW. I dont think this is quite Harts view. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3) Listen now (37 min) | The invention of digital scarcity. 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. FREE PREVIEW. DBH, Finding Health in Church, and A Syllogism on Sermonizing A survey of Harts trajectory suggests that he, at least, is not trying to restore some once-and-for-all spiritual inheritance. Let's hope David's new book serves to further that blessed conversation. 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. [6] His translation of the New Testament was published by Yale in 2017[7][8][9][10] with a 2nd edition in 2023. Twitter. davidbentleyhart.substack.com. This is, if Ive understood it correctly, one of several arguments he makes in The Beauty of the Infinite. 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. How Odd Of God To Save This Way - by Taylor Mertins David Bentley Hart Ep. 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. Of my two cats, Jack keeps up with Hart fitfully. 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. 5 And so to read Harts words, mellifluous like a field doctors balm, reassuring me that the wending paths my intellectual and personal lives have enforced on my life of faith with Christ are not signs of divine dereliction for a lack of what St. Benedict would have called stabilitas, still less some headlong free fall into heresy as an apostate (a word I have heard uttered by friends and trusted clerics, sometimes with phlegm, sometimes with a chuckle, and sometimes both), but are, rather, appropriate, understandable, even apocalyptically tuned-in responses to what Christianity has been, is, and is becoming in our late postmodern worldwell, it has me a bit emotional, honestly, and thats saying something. Open app. But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. David Hart 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 . I show his arguments are fallacious. It's easy for some individuals to create rich worlds of religious meaning and purpose, but for most of the people I know, the Church is absolutely essential to resisting the emptiness, busyness and superficiality of daily life in the secular West. It sure as hell didn't turn me into a saint but did actually make me realize that the spiritual dimension of reality is reality.[88]. [Pounce] Says Ja but never nein. But yeah, the book is about Christian universalismabout not only its history, but its logic. David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $24.95 | 386 pp. Share this post. [30], Hart added two books to his fiction works in 2021: Roland in Moonlight and Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale). Please, . [16] His primary academic interests have been philosophical theology, systematics, patristics, classical and continental philosophy, and South and East Asian religion with recent focus on the genealogy of classical and Christian metaphysics, ontology, the metaphysics of the soul, and the philosophy of mind. As an outspoken advocate of classical theism as seen, for example, in his book The Experience of God[74] who is also, more generally, engaged with the schools of continental philosophy, idealism, and neoplatonism,[75] Hart also affirms monism. Because David Bentley Hart freely admits to not having a "pastoral bone in his body," I'm curious to see whether he reflects upon the ways in which Christian tradition, at least when well-curated and held with an open hand, can bring incredible blessing and richness to people's lives. David Bentley Hart 5 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. 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. 13. 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 said in a 17 November 2020 interview about a pre-release reading of his book You Are Gods: At the end of the day, Im a monist as any sane person is. David Bentley Hart substack Unafraid conversations about anything. In 2017, Hart was described by Matthew Walther (a columnist at The Week and later founding editor of The Lamp) as "our greatest living essayist".[25]. 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. substack Hart has always oscillated between writing about Christianity from inside and writing about it from outside, as it were. Copy link. WebWe would like to show you a description here but the site wont allow us. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 07. 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. I believe that all that lilies of the field nonsense that Jesus preached was more than a daydream; and I think the longing for strict social hierarchy as an antidote to modernity is simply a longing for a reprise of the same sins that created modernity.[92]. David Bentley Hart 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. This must be true, to a point. 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. William Placher said of the book, "I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years. David Artman August 4, 2021. 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. in Theology from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. Although grounded primarily in arguments from Christian metaphysics and moral philosophy, the book also considers biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and historical theology (with extensive references to universalist ideas among Christian patristic figures such as Gregory of Nyssa). David Hart Aug 3, 2022 See all 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. David Bentley Hart Substack But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. Its fundamental argumentthat the traditional concept of tradition as a metaphysical force in all surviving post-Christendom Christianities, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the various Protestant communities is incoherent, that a workable concept of tradition is however necessary for Christianity to be what Christians claim it to be, and that the only possible such concept will be one that is oriented primarily towards the futureis one that I already believed, but could not have put as well and would not have thought to put, but also in succession to John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel. You must have JavaScript enabled to use this form. David Hart "[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. control, salvation, recapitulation, the crucified Christ, David Bentley Hart, and eschatological tension. Twitter. It suggests that nothing is truer than the historical moment when that death actually occurred, and that if other things are true its because that moment is. Design by. He served as visiting professor at Providence College, where he also previously held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture. Angelico Press Also by this author Say What You Mean Let me explain. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 See all 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. But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. Reality Minus The New Atlantis PhilChristman is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of Midwest Futures. 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. The opening chapters of Kenogaia, too, are pleasantly haunted, in the manner of childrens fantasy from the sixties and seventies, when authors were less afraid of giving children nightmares. David Hart Maggie Haberman's book shows how Donald Trumps New York experience set the context for his odd and sometimes dangerous presidential style. Share this post. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. 60 Dr. Thomas Senor - Christian Philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas, and editor of the academic journal Faith and Philosophy. Hart's frustration with the reactionary Christians of today is understandable, but unfortunately it has led to his forfeiture of sound scholarship. Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale WebDavid Bentley Hart | Substack David Bentley Hart Author of books and shorter works in a variety of genres--treatises, essay collections, fiction, children's fiction, vignettes, verse--on a variety of topics--religion, philosophy, literature, the arts, politics, culture, baseball, and so forth. Hello David, Hart WebDavid Bentley Hart | Substack David Bentley Hart Author of books and shorter works in a variety of genres--treatises, essay collections, fiction, children's fiction, vignettes, verse--on a variety of topics--religion, philosophy, literature, the arts, politics, culture, baseball, and so forth. substack : 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. What follows is my own open letter in response. Hart is the rare writer whose nonfiction works feature rhetorical artistry and poetic prose that I would not want to deprive the ordinary reader the joy of discovering for the first time on their own. Next. This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. A young boy, Michael, living on a world called Kenogaia, is entrusted by his father with a secret: there is a new object in the sky, headed to earth. DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no. With his essay style, Hart has often referenced H. L. Mencken as an influence. 3 2 3 likes Community David Bentley Hart WebWe would like to show you a description here but the site wont allow us. ", This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. In one way, at least, he is the least American of writers, in that adjectives and adverbs do not give him that twinge of guilt that so many of us have picked up from Hemingway and Twain, the suspicion that we are using them to distract the reader from our failure to describe some particular action or detailsome verb or nounprecisely enough.