David Bentley Hart

We are living this year in a cottage in the forest, halfway up the slope and under the slightly furrowed brow of a green mountain whose ridge forms our western horizon, and over which the brief twilight rises in the evening as a pale gold thinly fringed with dark amethyst. The days are filled with the incessant clamor of stridulating and timbalating insects, to which at night”undiminished”is added the mighty song of the Upland Chorus Frog (Pseudacris feriarum, for those with a taste for taxonomic Latin) and the sweet belling of the Cope’s Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis). Earlier in the summer, the woods were full of fireflies, but they are gone now… Continue Reading »

I had not known that Edward Upward was still alive until I read that he had died”a tad too late to compliment the man on his longevity, perhaps, but not too late to marvel at it. “He must have been ancient!” I exclaimed to my wife, who”with her customary Anglo-Saxon phlegm”ignored me entirely (which was for the best, of course, as she had no idea who I was talking about and wouldn’t have cared if she had). But I was quite right … . Continue Reading »

My son was still too deeply immersed in his thousandth or so re-reading of The Wind in the Willows to take an immediate interest in the copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince that I had just rescued for him from the chilly hinterlands of my library, so I decided to read it again myself. Memory, I found, had not really altered the story in my mind, but also had not quite prepared me for its total effect… . Continue Reading »

(Tens of thousands of Burmese have already died in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar this past weekend, and tens of thousands more are threatened by disease and a lack of food and clean water. Children comprise upward of 40 percent of the dead. We thought this would be an appropriate . . . . Continue Reading »

In the second section—or “fit”—of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman lectures the crew of his ship on the peculiar traits of the creature they have just crossed an ocean to find. There are, he tells his men, “five unmistakable marks” by which genuine Snarks . . . . Continue Reading »

Perhaps the simplest thing one might say about Jenson’s theology is that it is a theology of the living God. . . . . Continue Reading »

No one, no matter how great the scope of his imagination, should be able easily to absorb the immensity of the catastrophe that struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas this past year; nor would it be quite human to fail, in its wake, to feel . . . . Continue Reading »

Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love) by Matteo Maria Boiardo translated by Charles Stanley Ross Parlor. 717 pp. $40 Orlando (or Roland, as he was originally called), the greatest paladin of the (mythic) court of Charlemagne, once loomed in the consciousness of Western culture at least as large as . . . . Continue Reading »

Humor receives finitude as a gift, conscious of the suffering intrinsic to human existence, but capable of transcendence. . . . . Continue Reading »

Things could conceivably be far worse. The brief ebullition of indignation that followed Janet Jackson’s rather pathetic exhibitionist display during the Super Bowl’s halftime show was no doubt sincere, but surely it was nothing compared to the fury in Poland earlier this year after Polish state . . . . Continue Reading »