David Bentley Hart

The reason that Farrow, McClymond, Pakaluk and others cannot address the real argument in That All Shall Be Saved is that they are incapable of answering it.  Continue Reading »

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poetby thomas dilworthcounterpoint, 432 pages, $39.50 The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragmentsby david jonesfaber & faber, 112 pages, £15.99 Epoch and Artistby david jonesfaber & faber, 320 pages, £17.99 The Dying Gaul and Other Writingsby david jonesfaber & . . . . Continue Reading »

Journey to the Land of the Real:  A Translation of Equipée by victor segalen translated by natasha lehrer atlas, 136 pages, $17.20 The death of Victor Segalen (January 14, 1878–May 21, 1919) was perhaps an enviable one. This is not to say that it was not also tragic: He was still quite . . . . Continue Reading »

Underneath the searing fevers of Léon Bloy’s prose lay a man of sincere compassion and incorruptible integrity. Continue Reading »

The Face of the Buddhaby william empsonedited by rupert arrowsmithoxford, 208 pages, $49.95 William Empson (1906–1984) was not, as he is frequently said to have been, an “important critic,” but only because there is no such thing. By the same token, neither was he a unicorn, a square circle, . . . . Continue Reading »

The library in question is not the Great Library of Alexandria, but it is every bit as much a thing of the past, existing now as scarcely a memory—almost legendary, positively Edenic. I think it had been my ambition throughout much of my life to accumulate a collection of books in the ideal, . . . . Continue Reading »

Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practiceby stephen r. l. clarkuniversity of chicago, 336 pages, $55Probably nothing makes the philosophical texts of antiquity more remote from us in sensibility, or places a more imposing obstacle between the modern scholar and ancient thought, than our . . . . Continue Reading »

So, there I was, pondering, with an old familiar feeling of perplexity (about which more anon), certain reactions to my reaction to various reactions to the pope’s last encyclical, when it occurred to me that the one thing on which ­Hegelians of every stripe—right or left, theological or . . . . Continue Reading »

As he stood alone in the immense library of his college a week after Michaelmas term, mourning the arrival of his sixty-fifth birthday and contemplating the mild, pristinely white light pouring in through the high arched windows, the senior scholar reflected that over the years he had added no . . . . Continue Reading »

I was, it seemed, standing in my garden, gazing through shifting silvery curtains of mist at the muted yellow of a flowering forsythia. Somehow I knew it was only a little past dawn. I might have gone inside after a moment had I not heard the garden gate behind me swinging on its steel hinges and . . . . Continue Reading »