[82], Hart is married and has one grown son with whom he co-wrote the children's book The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla (2019). 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. 2023 Commonweal Magazine. Trumps authoritarian threat: this time it 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. Even here, Harts style is consistent with his theology. taylormertins.substack.com. Share this post. My copy of this book just arrived, and I'm eager to read it. Nevertheless, your point is well-taken. In 2017-2018, he served as the NDIAS's Assistant Director of Undergraduate Research Assistants. So the writer may as well use whatever comes to hand. 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. "[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. Ep. Ep. But the question What is David Bentley Harts deal? Obsessed with learning. 2020), Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Baker Academic, 2022), and You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame Press, 2022). Bhakti, Mahyna Buddhism, Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, and Sikhism), Kabbalah, Sufi Islam, and Taoic religions. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 See all 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. This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. David Hart Roland in Moonlight depends less on dramatic structure, but I still could have used about a hundred fewer pages of it. Email. David Bentley Hart $24.95 | 386 pp. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. How Odd Of God To Save This Way. 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. 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. 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 David Bentley Hart [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. There is craft, even genius, in the pacing of the early chapters, the way Hart leads the reader, by hints and coincidences, into a world where fairies exist and dogs talk. Reality Minus The New Atlantis Anyway, I also do not want to spoil the argument too much. [14], Hart earned a B.A. How Odd Of God To Save This Way. [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. 108 David Bentley Hart responds to claims of heresy by Fr. Near the end, Roland enjoins Hart to continue to believe all of it, and Hart agrees that he cannot relinquish any dimension of anything that I find appealing or admirable from all the worlds religions. Ep. How Odd Of God To Save This Way - by Taylor Mertins David Bentley Hart This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. WebA reader of David Bentley Hart's Substack informed me of a post where he engages in his usual bilious attacks and misrepresentations. David Artman August 4, 2021. Edward Hoppers paintings created a New York that conformed to the contours of his own life. 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. [29] Two of his books, A Splendid Wickedness in 2016 and The Dream-Child's Progress in 2017, are collections devoted to popular and literary essays that also include several short stories. Next. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. Robert Hart (rector of Saint Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, NC).[85]. DBH might doubt the intellectual pedigree of such tradition, but at the very least, the lives of the faithful testify to an experiential coherence within Christianity that is both real and life-giving. I will not give away what Hart sees as the future of Christian belief, but I will say that whatever the structure of that belief has been, we are facing and will continue to face the prospect of yet more seismic change to the Christian form in the course of postmodernity, in which we will need all the help we can get to figure out what Christianity will and should be in such a setting, provided it will survive and flourish; some of us are already living through at the microscopic level the very processes of deconstruction, reconstruction, repetition, and diaspora 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. 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. David Bentley Hart What is the purpose of human existence? Copy link. Eschatological Horizons" with David Bentley Hart - Substack 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. 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. 5 But yeah, the book is about Christian universalismabout not only its history, but its logic. Like the devil in that story, Hart cant stop talking. Perhaps, here, Sophie's World meets Alice through the Looking-Glass, or Don Quixote meets The Wind in the Willows. In his nonfiction writing, is he, perhaps, sometimes just a little hasty in his generalizations, a bit lavish with his use of the No serious scholar of X would ever think of denying Y formula? 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. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 2/3) Listen now (40 min) | Government-issued fiat money is destroying your life's work. 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 Near the conclusion of Atheist Delusions (2010), he lamented the end of the Christian revolution in world history: I am apprehensive, I confess, regarding a certain reactive, even counter-revolutionary, movement in late modern thinking, back toward the severer spiritual economies of pagan society and away from the high (and admittedly unrealistic) personalism or humanism with which the ancient Christian revolution coloredthough did not succeed in wholly formingour cultural conscience. It seems to me quite reasonable to imagine that, increasingly, the religion of the God-man, who summons human beings to become created gods through charity, will be replaced once again by the more ancient religion of the man-god, who wrests his divinity from the intractable material of his humanity, and solely through the exertions of his will. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the [11], A prolific essayist, Hart has written on topics as diverse as art, baseball, literature, religion, philosophy, consciousness, problem of evil, apocatastasis, theosis, fairies, film, and politics.