2021/09/07

David Bentley Hart - Wikipedia

David Bentley Hart - Wikipedia

David Bentley Hart

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For the religious historian specializing in Presbyterianism, see D. G. Hart.
David Bentley Hart
Born1965 (age 55–56)
NationalityAmerican
Scholarly background
Alma mater
ThesisBeauty, Violence, and Infinity[1] (1997)
InfluencesJesus,Plato, St. Paul, Origen, Plotinus, Cappadocian Fathers (esp. Gregory of Nyssa), Augustine, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac of Nineveh, Shankara, Eriugena, Symeon the New Theologian, Ramanuja, Ibn Arabi, Thomas Aquinas, Rumi, Nicholas of Cusa, George MacDonald, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Sergei Bulgakov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth, Henri de Lubac, Robert Jenson, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Vishishtadvaita Hinduism, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Neoplatonism, Perennialism,greek Eastern Orthodox theology
Scholarly work
DisciplineTheology
Sub-discipline
School or tradition
Notable worksAtheist Delusions (2009)

The Experience of God (2013)

That All Shall Be Saved (2019)

David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American philosopher and Eastern Orthodox theologian whose work encompasses a wide range of subjects and genres. A prolific essayist, he has written on topics as diverse as art, literature, religion, philosophy, film, baseball, and politics. He is also an author of fiction. As a religious scholar, his work engages heavily with classical, medieval and continental European philosophy, philosophical and systematic theology, patristic texts, and South and East Asian culture, religion, literature, philosophy and metaphysics. His translation of the New Testament was published in 2017.[2]

Life and career[edit source]

Academic career[edit source]

Hart earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Maryland, his Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Virginia.[3] He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Maryland. He served as visiting professor at Providence College, where he also previously held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture. During the 2014–2015 academic year, Hart was Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University in the Department of Theological Studies. In 2015, he was appointed as Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.[4]

Personal life[edit source]

Hart is a convert from high-church Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. Politically, he identifies as a Christian socialist[5] as well as a democratic socialist[6][7] and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.[8]

Literary writing[edit source]

Noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style,[9][10][11] Hart has been described by the conservative writer Matthew Walther as "our greatest living essayist".[12] He has written essays on subjects as varied as Don Juan, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Segalen, Leon Bloy, William Empson, David Jones, and baseball.[13] Two of his books, A Splendid Wickedness and The Dream-Child's Progress, are collections devoted to non-theological essays. They also include several short stories.

In 2012, The Devil and Pierre Gernet, a collection of his fiction, was released by Eerdmans.[14] His short stories have been described as "Borgesian"[15] and are elaborate metaphysical fables, full of wordplay, allusion, and structural puzzles.

Awards and reception[edit source]

Hart's first major work, The Beauty of the Infinite, an adaptation of his doctoral thesis, received acclaim from the theologians John Milbank, Janet Soskice, and Reinhard Hütter. William Placher said of the book, "I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years."[16] Geoffrey Wainwright said, "This magnificent and demanding volume should establish David Bentley Hart, around the world no less than in North America, as one of his generation's leading theologians."[17]

On 27 May 2011, Hart's book Atheist Delusions was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology,[18] and was praised by the agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny: “Hart has the gifts of a good advocate. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. He exposes his opponents’ errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision.”[19]

Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian, praised Hart's book The Experience of God as "the one theology book all atheists really should read".[20]

Selected bibliography[edit source]

Books[edit source]

  • Roland In Moonlight. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press. 2021.
  • Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2020.
  • The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla. With Patrick Robert Hart. New York: Angelico Press. 2019.
  • That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2019.
  • The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2017.
  • The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 2017.
  • The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays. New York: Angelico Press. 2017.
  • A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans: 2016.
  • The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2013.
  • The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2012.
  • Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
  • In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2008.
  • The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith. London: Quercus: 2007.
  • The Doors of the Sea. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2005.
  • The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2003.

Translations[edit source]

  • The New Testament: A Translation. Yale University Press: 2017.
  • Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2014. In collaboration with John R. Betz.

Articles[edit source]

Book reviews[edit source]

See also[edit source]

References[edit source]

  1. ^ Hart, David Bentley (1997). Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric (PhD thesis). Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia. OCLC 68963111.
  2. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2019-05-30. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
  3. ^ What disciplines are Dr. Hart's degrees in? "David Bentley Hart". The Berkley Center - Georgetown University. Archived from the original on 4 November 2013. Retrieved 4 November2013.
  4. ^ "David Bentley Hart". Notre Dame - Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 16 March 2016. Retrieved 23 March 2016.
  5. ^ https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
  6. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-09-02. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
  7. ^ https://www.facebook.com/dbhartwriter/posts/1094016380751517
  8. ^ https://www.facebook.com/720442008108958/posts/a-brief-political-confessionforgive-me-for-stepping-out-from-behind-the-curtain-/1094016380751517/
  9. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
  10. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
  11. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  12. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
  13. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  14. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-30. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  15. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-07-29. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
  16. ^ Placher, William C. (6 September 2004). "God's Beauty". The Christian Century. Archived from the original on 12 November 2018. Retrieved 11 November 2018.
  17. ^ "Archived copy". www.eerdmans.com. Eerdmans. Archived from the original on 2018-02-01. Retrieved 2018-01-31.
  18. ^ "Winner of £10,000 Theology Prize Announced". The Archbishop of Canterbury. May 2011. Archived from the original on 4 July 2012. Retrieved 4 November 2013.
  19. ^ "The Experience of God". www.amazon.com. The Times Literary Supplement.
  20. ^ Burkeman, Oliver. "The one theology book all atheists really should read". www.theguardian.com. The Guardian. Archived from the original on 7 January 2015. Retrieved 7 January 2015.

External links[edit source]








The Experience of God Sep 24, 2013
by David Bentley Hart
( 225 )
AUD 16.66

Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.

Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.

Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.
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You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature Apr 1, 2022
by David Bentley Hart
AUD 20.83



David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine.

In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy.

Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.
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