David Bentley Hart


David Bentley Hart is an American philosopher and theologian 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 an author of fiction.
As a religious scholar, 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 was published in 2017.

Life and career

Academic career

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. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas, 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, he was appointed as Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

Personal life

Hart is a convert from high-church Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. Politically, he identifies as a Christian socialist as well as a democratic socialist and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Literary writing

Noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style, Hart has been described by the conservative writer Matthew Walther as "our greatest living essayist". He has written essays on subjects as varied as Don Juan, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Segalen, Leon Bloy, William Empson, David Jones, and baseball. 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. His short stories have been described as "Borgesian" and are 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 the theologians 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."
On 27 May 2011, Hart's book Atheist Delusions was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology, and was praised by the 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.”
Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian, praised Hart's book The Experience of God as "the one theology book all atheists really should read".

Selected bibliography

Books