David Bentley Hart

Afew months ago, the morning before my eldest brother was to return home to Norway after a long visit, I dreamed that I had just awakened in the early light of dawn to find my dog Roland sitting at the end of my bed, a bar of softly glaucous shadow—cast by the central casement frame of my . . . . Continue Reading »

I could tell at once that he was a ghost. There was a certain translucency about him: The sallow light of the lamp on my library desk shone out not only behind him but through him, acquiring an emerald tint from the specter of his velvet smoking jacket as it did so. I also, nearly as quickly, . . . . Continue Reading »

This year, of course, we mark the centenary of the beginning of the end. It was in July of 1914 that European civilization entered its final death throes, the last convulsions of which would not subside for more than thirty years. After that, not even the illusions remained. The great Western . . . . Continue Reading »

Some years ago, when I was teaching in a respected department in a prestigious university in one of the older states of the union (note how nimbly I pirouette past specifics there), a slightly more senior member of the faculty stopped me in the hallway to trade brief pleasantries. After a moment, . . . . Continue Reading »

A few months ago, I began reading a book by the sociologist Christian Smith called What Is a Person?—concerning which, though it is very interesting, I have nothing of consequence to report just at the moment. I mention it here only because its early chapters reminded me of a topic upon which I . . . . Continue Reading »

The Divine Comedy  by dante alighieri  translated by clive james  liveright, 560 pages, $29.95 For me, the appearance of Dan Brown’s newest Robert Langdon novel, its dust jacket adorned with Dante’s flinty profile and a misappropriated title, poses a purely historical question: . . . . Continue Reading »

That Helen never really eloped with Paris, that the Achaeans and the Trojans fought their great war over an ethereal eidolon conjured up by divine spite, and that the true Helen went instead to live in Egypt is a story known to most classical scholars from the expiatory Palinode of Stesichorus (c. . . . . Continue Reading »

This is the last I shall write on this topic, I promise. I do not want to become morbidly fixated upon it, after all. But a few final observations have occurred to me. Some months ago, I admitted here that I find very little natural law theory persuasive, but granted that classical forms of the . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the temperamental advantages to be gained from a belief in divine providence is serenity in the face of history’s ambiguities. This may be one of the more subdued and unheroic expressions of faith, but for Christians trying to make moral sense of the story of Christendom—from its once . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the strangest claims often made by purveyors and consumers of today’s popular atheism is that disbelief in God involves no particular positive philosophy of reality, much less any kind of religion or creed, but consists merely in neutral incredulity toward a certain kind of factual . . . . Continue Reading »