David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American writer, editor, and academic scholar 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 a writer of fiction.

As a religious scholar and theologian, his work engages heavily with classical, medieval and continental European philosophy, philosophical and systematic theology, patristic texts, and South and East Asian culture, religion, and metaphysics. His translation of the New Testament appeared in 2017.^[1]

Background

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.^[2] 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, Hart was appointed as Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.^[3]

He is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Politically, he identifies as a democratic socialist^[4][5] and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America^[6].

Literary writing

Noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style,^[7][8][9] Hart has been described by one critic as "our greatest living essayist."^[10] In addition to his theological and scholarly output, he has gained attention as a critical and occasional writer, producing essays on subjects as varied as Don Juan, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Segalen, Leon Bloy, William Empson, David Jones, and baseball.^[11] 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.^[12] His short stories have been described as "Borgesian"^[13] and may be characterized as elaborate metaphysical fables, full of wordplay, allusion, and structural puzzles.

Awards and reception

Hart's first major work, The Beauty of the Infinite, an adaptation of his doctoral thesis, received acclaim from such notable theologians as 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." 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."^[14]

On 27 May 2011, Hart's book Atheist Delusions was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology^[15], and was praised by the famous 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.”^[16]

Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian, praised Hart's book The Experience of God as "the one theology book all atheists really should read."^[17]

Theological and philosophical writings

As a patristics scholar, Hart is especially concerned with the tradition of the Greek Fathers, with a particular emphasis on Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. His writings on such figures are distinctive in that they are not cast in the mold of typical patristics scholarship; Hart is quite willing, for instance, to use Maximus as a "corrective" to Martin Heidegger's "history of Being". The emphasis is very much on ideas and "deep readings", which seek to wrest from ancient texts insights that might fruitfully be brought into living contact with contemporary questions. Issues of the Scottish Journal of Theology and New Blackfriars have devoted special space to his work.

Of late, his work has been much concerned with philosophy of mind and the relation between science and metaphysics.

Selected bibliography

See also

• Christian philosophy
• Criticism of atheism
• Eastern Orthodox Christian theology
• Philosophy of religion
• Universal reconciliation

References

External links

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• David Bentley Hart, Featured Author at First Things