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As everyone knows, the bond between homo sapiens sapiens and canis lupus familiaris has traversed the ages. But few could have anticipated the remarkable exchange here recounted between David Bentley Hart and a noble beast named Roland. Roland in Moonlight breaks new ground within Hart's already astonishingly wide-ranging body of work. Eschewing the rigidity of the human either/or, Roland's diagonal approach offers secret illuminations and hidden affinities, as all and sundry come into his purview: paganism, dreams, language, myth, politics, American Christianity, Indian metaphysics, Japanese aesthetics... But perhaps most of all, the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of the nature of mind and consciousness. Woven through all this is a candid memoir, a story of loss and recovery, of personal trials and tribulations, with Roland "leading the way through the darkened rooms and the sporadic shafts of icy moonlight, his mottled coat a constantly fluctuating counterpoint of shadow and light"-a strange and sure balm for the soul. Roland in Moonlight is a wholly unforgettable reading experience-a journey into the possible upon the wings of a heavenly discourse between man and beast, and the singular-indeed, blessed-rapport that guides their lives. It is impossible not to be swept along as Roland takes flight.
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
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.
Religious scholar Hart argues that contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history and provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past.
As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God s power or God s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God if such exists allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering. He calls both to recognize in the worst catastrophes not the providential will of God but rather the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it wholly.
As everyone knows, the bond between homo sapiens sapiens and canis lupus familiaris has traversed the ages. But few could have anticipated the remarkable exchange here recounted between David Bentley Hart and a noble beast named Roland. Roland in Moonlight breaks new ground within Hart's already astonishingly wide-ranging body of work. Eschewing the rigidity of the human either/or, Roland's diagonal approach offers secret illuminations and hidden affinities, as all and sundry come into his purview: paganism, dreams, language, myth, politics, American Christianity, Indian metaphysics, Japanese aesthetics... But perhaps most of all, the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of the nature of mind and consciousness. Woven through all this is a candid memoir, a story of loss and recovery, of personal trials and tribulations, with Roland "leading the way through the darkened rooms and the sporadic shafts of icy moonlight, his mottled coat a constantly fluctuating counterpoint of shadow and light"-a strange and sure balm for the soul. Roland in Moonlight is a wholly unforgettable reading experience-a journey into the possible upon the wings of a heavenly discourse between man and beast, and the singular-indeed, blessed-rapport that guides their lives. It is impossible not to be swept along as Roland takes flight.
The "genre" of the modern Gnostic novel encompasses an especially eclectic range of works. With this book-a fantasy by turns dark, absurd, comic, frantic, and lyrical-David Bentley Hart joins a company that includes figures as diverse as Georges Bernanos, Anatole France, David Lindsay, Philip K. Dick, Patrick White, Umberto Eco, William Gaddis, Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, John Crowley, and Philip Pullman. In Kenogaia, a clockwork universe, an oppressive global society of ever-present surveillance, and the coming of age of its protagonist, Michael Ambrosius, are all disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious child from beyond the stars. Modeled on the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl, Hart's tale is an imaginative exploration of the relation between good and evil, the difference between reality and illusion, the struggle to live life in truth, and the nature of spiritual existence. In these pages, Hart emerges as a master of mythopoesis even while spinning out a rollicking full-on adventure about friendship, loyalty, and the rescue of true goodness from a universe darkened by delusion.
In many ways, we seem to be living in wintry times at present in the Western world. In this new book, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and a noted scholar of Eastern Christianity, introduces us to some aspects and personalities of the Orthodox Christian world, from the desert contemplatives of the fourth century to philosophers, novelists and activists of the modern era, that suggest where we might look for fresh light and warmth. He shows how this rich and diverse world opens up new ways of thinking about spirit and body, prayer and action, worship and social transformation, which go beyond the polarisations we take for granted. Taking in the world of the great spiritual anthology, the Philokalia, and the explorations of Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discussing the witness of figures like Maria Skobtsova, murdered in a German concentration camp for her defence of Jewish refugees, and the challenging theologies of modern Greek thinkers like John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras, Rowan Williams opens the door to a 'climate and landscape of our humanity that can indeed be warmed and transfigured'. This is an original and illuminating vision of a Christian world still none too familiar to Western believers and even to students of theology, showing how the deep-rooted themes of Eastern Christian thought can prompt new perspectives on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.
Brilliant scholar and wordsmith David Bentley Hart turns his mind and imagination to narrative fiction in this volume, The Devil and Pierre Gernet, a thought-provoking collection of four short stories and one novella. Anticipating questions about his shift in genre, Hart writes that "God is no more likely (and probably a good deal less likely) to be found in theology than in poetry and fiction." These stories -- "The Devil and Pierre Gernet," "The House of Apollo," "A Voice from the Emerald World," "The Ivory Gate," and "The Other" -- beguile and entrance the reader through Hart's engrossing, opulent writing style and the complex characters he evokes and explores. Often bedazzling, sometimes heartbreaking, and ultimately mesmerizing, Hart's wide-ranging stories are united by a common thread of haunting religious and philosophical questions about this life and the next. Here is fiction to fully engage both the mind and the heart.