david bentley hart substack david bentley hart substack

We'll recommend top publications based on the topics you select. 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. David Artman August 4, 2021. David Bentley Hart Facebook. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3) Listen now (37 min) | The invention of digital scarcity. 0:00. Obsessed with learning. It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophethat this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of Godbut it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender. 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. As an Episcopal priest with friends and colleagues who have left the Episcopal Church to join the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Ordinariate, and ACNA, I'm familiar with the voices which loudly proclaim that any pastoral and/or intellectual openness, at least around certain contested theological questions, is a sure sign of timidity and unbelief. The reviewer despairs. Email. [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. "[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." 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. 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. 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. Share this post. Ep. William Placher said of the book, "I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years. Before reading it, it would help if youve already read my review and Harts reply. 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. 3 2 3 likes Community Ep. davidbentleyhart.substack.com. Webdavidbentleyhart .substack .com. One asks the question in awe. But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. 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. davidbentleyhart.substack.com. Personally, I would like as many walls of citations standing between us and hell as possible. 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. [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. There is no Realer Real hiding in bare nouns and verbs behind the scrim of our perceptions and feelings. But the question What is David Bentley Harts deal? So I understand both the difficulty of explaining it and the impossibility of forgetting it, at once, and how it can change your life. 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. 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. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3) Listen now (37 min) | The invention of digital scarcity. 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. DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no. We can play games with it, but any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately reducible to a monism.[76]. Professor Hart was a Directors Fellow and a Templeton Fellow in residence at the NDIAS. (As far back as 2005, a character asks a Hart stand-in, Do you really believe anything, other than that God is a very appealing idea, and that youd like to live forever in some shady deer park above the clouds?) He has always shown affinity for Gnosticism: his moving 2009 story A Voice from the Emerald World was written in part to show his students the explanatory power of the Gnostic cosmos. At first I thought that this was another one of his provocations. Would it kill him, when he makes wildly controversial claimsas in That All Shall Be Saved, his 2019 universalist polemicto throw in just a few more citations, for the sake of those heavy-footed readers who want to double-check? Thank you, David, for this reflection. 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. "[67][68] Hart has expressed his admiration for sophiology and summarized his own understanding of it in his 2010 forward to Vladimir Solovyovs Justification of the Good. Please email comments to [emailprotected] and join the conversation on our Facebook page. in Theology from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In Kenogaia, as in C. S. Lewiss That Hideous Strength, the diffuseness of the ending, driven perhaps by the need to balance out all of the authors allegorical accounts, robs it of much of its emotional impact. Twitter. Perhaps, here, Sophie's World meets Alice through the Looking-Glass, or Don Quixote meets The Wind in the Willows. Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. 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. [71][72], As indicated by the wide range of topics covered in his essays, Hart has an interest in a diverse range of topics: baseball, Ancient Greek philosophy, patristics, Byzantine philosophy, Catholic theology, Comparative religious studies, Eastern philosophy, Eastern religions, Gnosticism, Hellenistic Judaism, historical criticism, Medieval philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, myth, The Dreaming, fairies, perennialism, philosophy of mind, theological aesthetics, and world literature.[73]. "[53][54] In late 2022 and early 2023, Fr. [15] He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Maryland. His short stories have been described as "Borgesian" and are elaborate metaphysical fables, full of wordplay, allusion, and structural puzzles. 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?" 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. 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. [44][45], In addition to these accolades, Hart has been criticized by some scholars. As literary influences, Hart and others have noted Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. [82], Hart is married and has one grown son with whom he co-wrote the children's book The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla (2019). [89][90][91] On August 8, 2020, Hart wrote: Im basically an anarchist and communalist. 0:00. Its possible to measure that trajectory by comparing two statements about the possibilities of Christian renewal. 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. 0:00. Of his longer fictions, Roland in Moonlight is the strangest, and the most accomplished. David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $24.95 | 386 pp. This just distracts from examining the serious consequences of his own views. 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]. Anyway, I also do not want to spoil the argument too much. 108 David Bentley Hart responds to claims of heresy by Fr. In 2017-2018, he served as the NDIAS's Assistant Director of Undergraduate Research Assistants. What is the purpose of human existence? A. Baker, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Vladimir Nabokov.[64]. 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. Thousands of paid subscribers Leaves in the Wind 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. 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. David Hart Aug 3, 2022 See all During the 20142015 academic year, Hart was Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University in the Department of Theological Studies. [26], Hart's essays sometimes explored the boundaries between different religious traditions as with "Saint Sakyamuni" (2009)[27] or the boundaries of orthodoxy as with "Saint Origen" (2015). 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. control, salvation, recapitulation, the crucified Christ, David Bentley Hart, and eschatological tension. 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. Hart refers to the idea of an atemporal fall in his 2005 book The Doors of the Sea as well as in his essay "The Devils March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations" (from his 2020 book Theological Territories): The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. 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. What follows is my own open letter in response. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no. Whatever Harts limitationsthey are huge, as one would expect; when a giant stumbles he makes a messhe is brilliant, and frequently lovable, and on a couple of occasions personally helpful to me. Socrates will always surpass Gorgias in the long run. WebSelf As Lab | David Hart | Substack About Self As Lab I have always been curious. A survey of Harts trajectory suggests that he, at least, is not trying to restore some once-and-for-all spiritual inheritance. taylormertins.substack.com. WebWe would like to show you a description here but the site wont allow us. [48][49] Peter Leithart wrote a critical response to Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved called "Good God?" He revealed his socialism, perhaps more offensive to many American Christians than even his universalism. But yeah, the book is about Christian universalismabout not only its history, but its logic. Support our work today. Ep. When did he have time to learn so many languages, that he can refer familiarly to the literatures of Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Americas, and to fine details of theological controversy in several faiths? David Bentley Harts prodigious mind and imagination has given us just such a book. More fundamentally, some longtime readers of Hart wonder what he is driving at. Hello David, Will these books interest readers who arent otherwise concerned with Harts worldview? Aurelian is a political science prof at Indiana University in Bloomington. My parish has burned out ex-Evangelicals and skeptical half-Buddhists who have found themselves unexpectedly fed and held by a prayerbook liturgy and preaching rooted in a thoroughly Nicene understanding of the Bible. Jacks problems are the opposite of Harts; he knows his niche too well. Nevertheless, your point is well-taken. Let me explain. Must he bluster so? David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $24.95 | 386 pp. Next. Ep. I show his arguments are fallacious. David Hart Oct 30, 2022 08. Describing Roland in Moonlight for a review in Church Times, John Saxbee (former Bishop of Lincoln) wrote: "Sometimes, a book defies description or, rather, refuses to settle into a conventional genre. : 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. David Bentley Hart Angelico Press $24.95 | 386 pp. 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). Ep. 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?" Unafraid conversations about anything. [78][79][80] This grounding in Christian metaphysics, insistence on universalism being the only true articulation of the Christian gospel, and use of combative rhetoric all combine to make Hart's case for universalism more uncompromising than most previous Christian arguments, and this has led to the use of the term "hard universalism" to describe Hart's position.[81]. 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. Roland in Moonlight depends less on dramatic structure, but I still could have used about a hundred fewer pages of it. Luckily, I had Harts example to follow. Edward Hoppers paintings created a New York that conformed to the contours of his own life. WebSelf As Lab | David Hart | Substack About Self As Lab I have always been curious. 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. My copy of this book just arrived, and I'm eager to read it. What, exactly, is David Bentley Harts deal? Ep. But the imminent collapse of the civil order of the entire world doth make pragmatists of us all. 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. Ep. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3) Listen now (37 min) | The invention of digital scarcity. The picture here is of a perhaps permanently stalled Christianization of the world, turned back by the Promethean arrogance of modernity. As recently as the mid-2000s, he couldwith his strictures on liberalism, his anger at the emptiness of modernitys worship of choice, his First Things columnlook like another bowtied Christian cultural conservative, albeit an unusually interesting one. Before reading it, it would help if youve already read my review and Harts reply. Or, to put the matter differently, its roots go back that far and even to a few years before that. (This, according to the theopolitics of Kenogaia, is impossible, and, worse, illegal.) But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. As I slouch towards forty, this means far more to me than it once did. David Artman August 4, 2021. Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 2/3) Listen now (40 min) | Government-issued fiat money is destroying your life's work. David Bentley Hart's Vision of Universal ReconciliationAn Extended Review", "Shall All Be Saved? 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Launched 2 years ago Biblical scholarship, classics, theology, philosophy, popular culture, poetry, short stories, and gardening. 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. Facebook. Next. [28], In 2012, The Devil and Pierre Gernet, a collection of his fiction, was released by Eerdmans. Next. [65] Hart has also called Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew one of the hopes of Orthodoxy[66] and Sergei Bulgakov "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. [17], Hart has authored eighteen books and produced two translated works. 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 That All Shall Be Saved) 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. Please, . ne turba volent rapidis ludibria ventis Rananim Now: Lawrencian Musings on Anti-Machine Theology, This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Yet even Harrys excessive and grotesque embodiment seems the gift of a good God. 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. Read in the Substack app. With his essay style, Hart has often referenced H. L. Mencken as an influence. 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. Next. Hello David, 62 Dr. David Bentley Hart on his Substack newsletter "Leaves in the Wind" and, of course, Frank Robinson. Open app. Some readers will dislike the books whimsicality and excesses, but Rolands digressions on the mind-cosmos relationship make these a small price to pay. The death of Cardinal Pell exposed conservative Catholic efforts to secure the reversal of the Francis agenda at the next conclave.