What do you think?
Rate this book
The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays
51 Essays on Books, Authors, Words, Politics, et al. And an annotated reading list of 30 favorite books "for a very long trip."By turns champion of the Christian difference and voice of dissent; friend to Moley and Water Rat and scourge to those of scientistic bent--these are but a few of the many guises of David Bentley Hart, whose books, essays, and reviews over the past twenty years have established him as one of America's foremost theologians, critics, and men of letters.Few have escaped Hart's withering scrutiny, as he has exploded comfortable attitudes of believers and unbelievers alike. Here he turns his vital, and at times acerbic, pen to matters of truly high books and authors--and in so doing ranges far and wide across our intellectual landscape. Writing on everything from Alice to Zen, here are meditations on culture, theology, and politics; on words, sports, and nature.Disarming, insightful, illuminating--and often wickedly funny--the essays in The Dream-Child's Progress give evidence of the great gift we have in a Christian intellectual engaging our world with warmth, candor, and clarity--but most of all, with charity.
360 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 1, 2017
61 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
David Bentley Hart
44 books698 followersDavid Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 7, 2021
Who Should Read This Book? – Anyone who enjoys reading profound, entertaining and imaginative essays on philosophy, theology, history and even book reviews on obscure books.
What’s the Big Takeaway? – I am not sure there is one takeaway from a book like this as the essays range in topic far and wide. I suppose one takeaway might be: we need writers like David Bentley Hart. I’ve wondered in the past who the CS Lewis or George MacDonald is of our day; someone who writes both fun and whimsical stories as well as insightful thoughts on faith and culture. Most Christian fiction is lame and most apologetics is boring. There are a few writers who rise to the top and combine both. Marilynne Robinson is one and David Bentley Hart is another (though, he is definitely not an ‘apologist’ and would deplore the title).
A Quote: “I take it as an absolutely irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf very well is probably capable of little else, while a man capable of watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything” (138)
“I, by contrast, hope to see puppies in paradise, and persevere in faith principally for that reason” (264)
I’ve sung the praises of David Bentley Hart’s writing before. Few authors I have encountered appeal to both the intellect and the imagination. Hart is brilliant and having a dictionary close by when reading his work is helpful. But he’s also witty and whimsical, seen most clearly in his recent (and I predict my favorite book of 2021) Roland in the Moonlight. Anyone who thinks so highly of dogs is an admirable guy.
This collection of essays, published a few years back, is an eclectic set. Hart’s interests range widely and the essays reflect that. He begins by offering a reading list of obscure books and the book reviews throughout this book are equally obscure. The first essay in the book is a celebration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories which are anything but obscure. Sadly, to Hart, these stories are not read as much as they once were as adults think we should read more realistic fiction (and I think of Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories here which laments much the same thing) and our tendency to not really encourage our kids to read at all:
“True, we can still be beguiled by bad fiction whose only recommendation is its ‘realism’ or ‘seriousness’ (and so waste our time on the dreary moralism and creative-writing-class prose of Ian McEwan, or the blundering bombast of Cormac McCarthy). But most of us are blessedly free from the imaginatively crippling prejudice that only such seriousness can be profound; and I suspect it was Carroll, to a greater degree than we usually realize, who was our liberator” (19).
“Today, of course, it is often asserted that they are really books for adults, but mostly on account of the obscurity now of many of their cultural references, and of our tendency these days to raise our children as instinctive illiterates who have to be judiciously shielded from new words and complex syntax, rather than as the omnivorously assimilative and rapidly adaptable creatures they are” (19).
Later, in an essay celebrating good bad books, Hart again laments the replacement of reading with screens:
“I want here to praise them and all those other good bad books that helped teach me to seek out and love far better books than they, and to voice the hope that my childhood experience of total immersion in stories that required as much from my imagination as they gave in return is not becoming an ever rarer thing for children. Statistics tell us that children today a great deal of time in front of screens – televisions, computers, tablets, car DVD systems, and so on – and very little reading. It seems to me a sad thing for a child to rely chiefly on entertainments that render the imagination mostly quiescent. There is a point in every life, moreover, at which the dimensions of the imagination become largerly fixed, and I suspect that those dimensions also somewhere determine the limits of a persons’ powers of reason. And this – not to sound too alarmist – ought perhaps cause us some anxiety” (220)
May we all read more! Speaking of reading, though I may never read them, I jotted down some authors to check out from Hart’s lists. It is not surprising that Hart is not a fan of the so-called “New Atheists” as he heaps scorn upon their arguments in a memorable essay titled “Believe it or Not: On the Very Disappointing Literature of the New Atheism”:
“The current atheism a la mode, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment; and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral, toys” (73).
Its not necessarily their fault, as our entire culture fails at discussing religion well:
“It seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike” (75).
That said, in response to weak Christianity, the new atheism is formed too simply and easily:
“The principle source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infield lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefather in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and, as a result, have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants or a great love because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel” (76).
They reject an understanding of God thought ought to be rejected, one that is little to do with classical theism and more modern Deism:
“For all of the New Atheists, the concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as teh first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, they are concerned with eh sort of God believed in by seventeenth and eighteenth century Deists” (76-77).
What is a classical view of God? Hart’s book The Experience of God is on this, but he touches on it in this essay:
“It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend upon absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends upon; or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for (as Hume knew). And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress – traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism – is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God” (81)
The first book I ever read from Hart was Atheist Delusions, a response to the new atheists with he worst title of all his books, a title which Hart says was not his idea. Plenty of evangelical Christians enjoyed reading this book, seeing Hart in all his sarcastic and snarky glory. But as readers of that book came to learn, Hart has plenty of scorn for Christians in America. In “The Needle’s Eye” he writes:
“The Ease with which Americans often confuse their civic and fiscal values with Christian virtue is always a little baffling, granted, and I realize that every Christian people has tended to confuse their interests and ideals of this sort or that class or nation or ideology or empire with the moral commands of the gospels. Many American Christinas, though, have a special talent for elevating the blandest and most morally negatory aspects of social and economic life to the status of positive spiritual goods, essentially laudable, and somehow all of a piece with he teachings of Christ” (203)
He goes on to muse how only in America is it possible to combine Christian faith with libertarian politics:
“America is such a n odd combination of Christian pieties and post-Christian habits of thought. What other country could produce persons, for instance, who believe it possible to be both Christian and Libertarian?” (290)
This culminates in one of the best essays int he book, Mammon Ascendant. Here Hart questions what is usually unquestioned among American Christians: the friendship between faith and capitalism. Capitalism is no friend to Christianity but actually is a competing faith (here I am reminded of Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon and Daniel Bell’s The Economy of Desire). Hart writes: “The history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages” (313).
Most of these essays are at close to ten years old. It would have been nice to have notations of when each essay was first published. Since the essays were written and the book was published, the internal conflicts of Christianity in America have grown. As Jesus says, you cannot serve two masters and the ideals of libertarian freedom, freemarket capitalism, nationalism – continue to overwhelm anything resembling a Christian ethic. This new religion of Christian Nationalism elected Trump. One of the best passages in the book is Hart’s words on Trump, published in 2015:
“How obvious it seems to me now, ho pure and lucid. Here, clearly, is an ideal model of the diabolical: cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian with poutish effeminate lips, bulging jowls, and a grotesque coiffed red, floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers. That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter: the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump – though perhaps a little nicer.” (167)
Hart is critical of American Christianity and recognizes how far we are from the first Christians. This point is made in the final essay of the book, “Christ’s Rabble”. Though this separation from the first Christians is not unique to American Christianity, for Hart it is almost as old as faith itself. We have, for centuries, learned to read scripture in such a way to make it more palatable. The first Christians were nothing like us:
“I think it reasonable to ask not whether we are Christians (by that standard, all fall short), but whether in our wildest imaginings we could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ. And I think the fairly obvious answer is that we could not. I do not mean merely that most of us find the moral requirements laid out in Christian scripture a little onerous, though of course we do. . . Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent” (336).
Hart does not wag a finger at us in writing this. He’s not writing as if he lives like these folks either. There’s no hypocrisy here, just honest history admitting none of us really want to or are able to live this way. Perhaps this is a result of Hart’s Christian Universalism. Knowing all will ultimately be saved, he can both lament how far we are from the first Christians and not try to manipulate us to live that way. Rather than explaining it away or imagining we live just like them and are thus part of a tiny group of real and true Christians, Hart leaves it as is. This has always been the beauty of Hart’s writing – he writes about what he wants, from obscure authors to conversations with his dog, and he writes the truth.
What’s the Big Takeaway? – I am not sure there is one takeaway from a book like this as the essays range in topic far and wide. I suppose one takeaway might be: we need writers like David Bentley Hart. I’ve wondered in the past who the CS Lewis or George MacDonald is of our day; someone who writes both fun and whimsical stories as well as insightful thoughts on faith and culture. Most Christian fiction is lame and most apologetics is boring. There are a few writers who rise to the top and combine both. Marilynne Robinson is one and David Bentley Hart is another (though, he is definitely not an ‘apologist’ and would deplore the title).
A Quote: “I take it as an absolutely irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf very well is probably capable of little else, while a man capable of watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything” (138)
“I, by contrast, hope to see puppies in paradise, and persevere in faith principally for that reason” (264)
I’ve sung the praises of David Bentley Hart’s writing before. Few authors I have encountered appeal to both the intellect and the imagination. Hart is brilliant and having a dictionary close by when reading his work is helpful. But he’s also witty and whimsical, seen most clearly in his recent (and I predict my favorite book of 2021) Roland in the Moonlight. Anyone who thinks so highly of dogs is an admirable guy.
This collection of essays, published a few years back, is an eclectic set. Hart’s interests range widely and the essays reflect that. He begins by offering a reading list of obscure books and the book reviews throughout this book are equally obscure. The first essay in the book is a celebration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories which are anything but obscure. Sadly, to Hart, these stories are not read as much as they once were as adults think we should read more realistic fiction (and I think of Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories here which laments much the same thing) and our tendency to not really encourage our kids to read at all:
“True, we can still be beguiled by bad fiction whose only recommendation is its ‘realism’ or ‘seriousness’ (and so waste our time on the dreary moralism and creative-writing-class prose of Ian McEwan, or the blundering bombast of Cormac McCarthy). But most of us are blessedly free from the imaginatively crippling prejudice that only such seriousness can be profound; and I suspect it was Carroll, to a greater degree than we usually realize, who was our liberator” (19).
“Today, of course, it is often asserted that they are really books for adults, but mostly on account of the obscurity now of many of their cultural references, and of our tendency these days to raise our children as instinctive illiterates who have to be judiciously shielded from new words and complex syntax, rather than as the omnivorously assimilative and rapidly adaptable creatures they are” (19).
Later, in an essay celebrating good bad books, Hart again laments the replacement of reading with screens:
“I want here to praise them and all those other good bad books that helped teach me to seek out and love far better books than they, and to voice the hope that my childhood experience of total immersion in stories that required as much from my imagination as they gave in return is not becoming an ever rarer thing for children. Statistics tell us that children today a great deal of time in front of screens – televisions, computers, tablets, car DVD systems, and so on – and very little reading. It seems to me a sad thing for a child to rely chiefly on entertainments that render the imagination mostly quiescent. There is a point in every life, moreover, at which the dimensions of the imagination become largerly fixed, and I suspect that those dimensions also somewhere determine the limits of a persons’ powers of reason. And this – not to sound too alarmist – ought perhaps cause us some anxiety” (220)
May we all read more! Speaking of reading, though I may never read them, I jotted down some authors to check out from Hart’s lists. It is not surprising that Hart is not a fan of the so-called “New Atheists” as he heaps scorn upon their arguments in a memorable essay titled “Believe it or Not: On the Very Disappointing Literature of the New Atheism”:
“The current atheism a la mode, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment; and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral, toys” (73).
Its not necessarily their fault, as our entire culture fails at discussing religion well:
“It seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike” (75).
That said, in response to weak Christianity, the new atheism is formed too simply and easily:
“The principle source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infield lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefather in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and, as a result, have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants or a great love because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel” (76).
They reject an understanding of God thought ought to be rejected, one that is little to do with classical theism and more modern Deism:
“For all of the New Atheists, the concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as teh first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, they are concerned with eh sort of God believed in by seventeenth and eighteenth century Deists” (76-77).
What is a classical view of God? Hart’s book The Experience of God is on this, but he touches on it in this essay:
“It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend upon absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends upon; or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for (as Hume knew). And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress – traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism – is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God” (81)
The first book I ever read from Hart was Atheist Delusions, a response to the new atheists with he worst title of all his books, a title which Hart says was not his idea. Plenty of evangelical Christians enjoyed reading this book, seeing Hart in all his sarcastic and snarky glory. But as readers of that book came to learn, Hart has plenty of scorn for Christians in America. In “The Needle’s Eye” he writes:
“The Ease with which Americans often confuse their civic and fiscal values with Christian virtue is always a little baffling, granted, and I realize that every Christian people has tended to confuse their interests and ideals of this sort or that class or nation or ideology or empire with the moral commands of the gospels. Many American Christinas, though, have a special talent for elevating the blandest and most morally negatory aspects of social and economic life to the status of positive spiritual goods, essentially laudable, and somehow all of a piece with he teachings of Christ” (203)
He goes on to muse how only in America is it possible to combine Christian faith with libertarian politics:
“America is such a n odd combination of Christian pieties and post-Christian habits of thought. What other country could produce persons, for instance, who believe it possible to be both Christian and Libertarian?” (290)
This culminates in one of the best essays int he book, Mammon Ascendant. Here Hart questions what is usually unquestioned among American Christians: the friendship between faith and capitalism. Capitalism is no friend to Christianity but actually is a competing faith (here I am reminded of Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon and Daniel Bell’s The Economy of Desire). Hart writes: “The history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages” (313).
Most of these essays are at close to ten years old. It would have been nice to have notations of when each essay was first published. Since the essays were written and the book was published, the internal conflicts of Christianity in America have grown. As Jesus says, you cannot serve two masters and the ideals of libertarian freedom, freemarket capitalism, nationalism – continue to overwhelm anything resembling a Christian ethic. This new religion of Christian Nationalism elected Trump. One of the best passages in the book is Hart’s words on Trump, published in 2015:
“How obvious it seems to me now, ho pure and lucid. Here, clearly, is an ideal model of the diabolical: cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian with poutish effeminate lips, bulging jowls, and a grotesque coiffed red, floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers. That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter: the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump – though perhaps a little nicer.” (167)
Hart is critical of American Christianity and recognizes how far we are from the first Christians. This point is made in the final essay of the book, “Christ’s Rabble”. Though this separation from the first Christians is not unique to American Christianity, for Hart it is almost as old as faith itself. We have, for centuries, learned to read scripture in such a way to make it more palatable. The first Christians were nothing like us:
“I think it reasonable to ask not whether we are Christians (by that standard, all fall short), but whether in our wildest imaginings we could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ. And I think the fairly obvious answer is that we could not. I do not mean merely that most of us find the moral requirements laid out in Christian scripture a little onerous, though of course we do. . . Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent” (336).
Hart does not wag a finger at us in writing this. He’s not writing as if he lives like these folks either. There’s no hypocrisy here, just honest history admitting none of us really want to or are able to live this way. Perhaps this is a result of Hart’s Christian Universalism. Knowing all will ultimately be saved, he can both lament how far we are from the first Christians and not try to manipulate us to live that way. Rather than explaining it away or imagining we live just like them and are thus part of a tiny group of real and true Christians, Hart leaves it as is. This has always been the beauty of Hart’s writing – he writes about what he wants, from obscure authors to conversations with his dog, and he writes the truth.
June 26, 2017
Rather than write a proper review of this delightful collection of essays, I have chosen simply to catalog my favorite insults or witticisms it contains:
"One has to concede that no other book by Richard Dawkins has sold nearly as well The God Delusion, his majestically maladroit adventure into the realm of abstract ideas (something for which he has an aptitude roughly equivalent to a porpoise's aptitude for tap-dancing)." (57)
"In regard to [young earth creationists, Dawkins] does not really need to expend much energy. After all, ranged against their beliefs is nothing less than the entire universe and every physical datum it comprises." (58)
"[Dawkins'] own pet proof of 'why there almost certainly is no God' (in which he takes much evident pride) is one that a usually mild-spoken friend of mine – who has devoted too much of his life to teaching undergraduates the basic rules of logic and the elementary language of philosophy, and who has no religious convictions to speak of– has described as 'possibly the single most incompetent logical argument ever made for or against anything in the whole history of the human race.'" (60)
"I take it as an irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf very well is probably capable of little else, while a man capable watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything." (138)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is only a short road that leads from grammatical laxity to cannibalism." (183)
This final quote, the conclusion of Hart's search for an adequate characterization of the Devil, it should be forever remembered, was published in May of 2011:
"How obvious it seems to me now, how pure and lucid. Here, clearly, is an ideal model of the diabolical: cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian with poutish effeminate lips, bulging jowls, and a grotesque coiffeur, floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers. That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter: the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump–though perhaps just a little nicer." (167)
In all seriousness, though, this is a remarkable collection of essays. Hart is a brilliant essayist, and I know of few living authors who have attained a comparable breadth and depth of education. There are profound lessons to be learned and, I hope it is clear, good laughs to be had in reading The Dream Child's Progress.
"One has to concede that no other book by Richard Dawkins has sold nearly as well The God Delusion, his majestically maladroit adventure into the realm of abstract ideas (something for which he has an aptitude roughly equivalent to a porpoise's aptitude for tap-dancing)." (57)
"In regard to [young earth creationists, Dawkins] does not really need to expend much energy. After all, ranged against their beliefs is nothing less than the entire universe and every physical datum it comprises." (58)
"[Dawkins'] own pet proof of 'why there almost certainly is no God' (in which he takes much evident pride) is one that a usually mild-spoken friend of mine – who has devoted too much of his life to teaching undergraduates the basic rules of logic and the elementary language of philosophy, and who has no religious convictions to speak of– has described as 'possibly the single most incompetent logical argument ever made for or against anything in the whole history of the human race.'" (60)
"I take it as an irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf very well is probably capable of little else, while a man capable watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything." (138)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is only a short road that leads from grammatical laxity to cannibalism." (183)
This final quote, the conclusion of Hart's search for an adequate characterization of the Devil, it should be forever remembered, was published in May of 2011:
"How obvious it seems to me now, how pure and lucid. Here, clearly, is an ideal model of the diabolical: cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian with poutish effeminate lips, bulging jowls, and a grotesque coiffeur, floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers. That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter: the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump–though perhaps just a little nicer." (167)
In all seriousness, though, this is a remarkable collection of essays. Hart is a brilliant essayist, and I know of few living authors who have attained a comparable breadth and depth of education. There are profound lessons to be learned and, I hope it is clear, good laughs to be had in reading The Dream Child's Progress.
January 23, 2021
I filled fourteen pages with notes and thoughts, most of which may remain too private to share. I've found a new contemporary idol.
I laughed much through this book. Hart does very well using big words in a way that small minds can understand and enjoy them. I never felt like I was reading something out of my league, though in reality I was.
This is a collection of essays on books, music, people, ideas, and also include two short pieces of fiction written with a mythological flair. I really enjoyed the introduction and have been inspired to use the word "pogonotrophy" in a story of my own. The first essay, for which this book is named after, was a darling piece about "Alice in Wonderland" and its author.
Hart has many interesting views that I couldn't disagree with. Universalism seems to be his favorite, but he is also quite an advocate of Christians returning to a stricter New Testament mindset. He doesn't seem to be of the mind that the OT is more restrictive, but that we were given many NT commands that modern Christians tend to view as mere suggestions to be ignored. He goes as far as to condemn wealth and even capitalism, stating that it is not a free market, but that which murdered the free market that was only beginning to arise out of the middle ages.
His views are eccentrically unique, but far from irrational or absurd. Can you believe, he even rationalizes AGAINST common sense!?
His satire, though, is what makes all of his writing blossom. "I may be wrong about this," he writes. "But it does sometimes seem to me that the internet is a remarkable inhospitable environment for irony of any kind."
I laughed much through this book. Hart does very well using big words in a way that small minds can understand and enjoy them. I never felt like I was reading something out of my league, though in reality I was.
This is a collection of essays on books, music, people, ideas, and also include two short pieces of fiction written with a mythological flair. I really enjoyed the introduction and have been inspired to use the word "pogonotrophy" in a story of my own. The first essay, for which this book is named after, was a darling piece about "Alice in Wonderland" and its author.
Hart has many interesting views that I couldn't disagree with. Universalism seems to be his favorite, but he is also quite an advocate of Christians returning to a stricter New Testament mindset. He doesn't seem to be of the mind that the OT is more restrictive, but that we were given many NT commands that modern Christians tend to view as mere suggestions to be ignored. He goes as far as to condemn wealth and even capitalism, stating that it is not a free market, but that which murdered the free market that was only beginning to arise out of the middle ages.
His views are eccentrically unique, but far from irrational or absurd. Can you believe, he even rationalizes AGAINST common sense!?
His satire, though, is what makes all of his writing blossom. "I may be wrong about this," he writes. "But it does sometimes seem to me that the internet is a remarkable inhospitable environment for irony of any kind."
January 4, 2018
Please read this book
Many consider DBH a pompous and belligerent apologist of the Christian faith, which may be true, but he is also a gift to the church and the world.
Many consider DBH a pompous and belligerent apologist of the Christian faith, which may be true, but he is also a gift to the church and the world.
June 23, 2020
Some real gems in here
July 27, 2021
Mr Hart elects to dismiss arguments for atheism as childish, ill-considered, and illogical: he offers a series of ad hominem slurs and no attempt to engage with the arguments (because, I guess, he thought they were too stupid to merit a response?). This is a bit rich coming from a 'thinker' peddling adherence to a wodge of incoherent bronze age superstitious piffle. But maybe his invisible sky-fairy told him to go that route. Ad hominem is a two-edged blade.
January 11, 2019
A hefty collection of essays by that prescriptivist amateur linguist and curmudgeonly theologian, David Bentley Hart. From works on the moral injunctions of the New Testament to satirical arguments for the re-introduction of dueling into public life, this collection is far from dull. Come for the stirring prose on literature and stay for the insightful theology.
January 25, 2020
Essays
This was a book of essays with some seeming less timely and useful than others. I found ones on politics and religion very timely, yet some literary points I felt left out of the joke.
This was a book of essays with some seeming less timely and useful than others. I found ones on politics and religion very timely, yet some literary points I felt left out of the joke.
September 15, 2017
Excellent collection of essays. A challenge rot read at times but worth it
April 30, 2020
A few essays are either uninteresting or poor inclusions, but most of the essays, and Hart's style, are four or five stars, making this well worth the read.
May 24, 2024
The two essay collections known as A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays as well as Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays comprise the occasional pieces David Bentley Hart wrote for various outlets (over what time period?), but mostly for First Things. They together showcase the eclectic range of Hart's interests. Both contain book reviews, narrative stories, writings on theology, but they diverge from there. Here there are a number of pieces on politics and political economy: some point out how capitalism is incapable with Christianity: in such works as The Needle’s Eye, Habeas Patrum, and (above all) Mammon Ascendent. Others write on Scripture. The narrative pieces are different from the ones in Splendid wickedness. Overall, it was a sheer delight to read.
April 8, 2017
51 esseetä, jotka ovat kahta lukuunottamatta mukavan lyhyitä lukea ja joista lähes jokainen on kiinnostava ja omaperäinen. Hartin jäljittelemätön tyyli saa aikaan kaunista proosaa, jota on miellyttävä lukea.
Joukossa on aika paljon mm. kirja-arvosteluja, joista osa ei sytyttänyt.
Hart tunnustautuu universalistiksi: kaikki pelastuvat. Kiinnostavimpia olivat tätä teemaa käsittelevät esseet (mm. Augustinuksen ja Gregorius Nyssalaisen Paavali-tulkintaa ja Origenestä ja viidettä ekumeenistä kirkolliskokousta käsittelevät).
Myös rahaa sekä toisaalta sekulaarisaation ja kapitalismin suhdetta pohtivat esseet koukuttivat. Hart väittää, että sekularisaatio liittyy väistämättä läntiseen talousjärjestelmään; sekularisaatio on kuluttajahenkisen kapitalismin kulttuurinen ilmentymä. Ostan tämän ainakin osittain.
En oikein näe, kuinka läntisellä pallonpuoliskolla asuvalla teologilla olisi varaa olla lukematta DBH:ta.
Omia kohokohtiani:
- A Person you Flee at Parties (kyse siitä, miksi Saatana kuvataan kulttuurissa tyylikkäänä ja kiinnostavana -- "How then, should one portray the prince of darkness? A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos. -- That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter : the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump - though perhaps just a little nicer.")
- Hypatia Reassembled
- The Greatest Nation on Earth (vastaus: Bhutan)
- Golf and the Metaphysics of Morals ("I take it as an absolutely irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf is probably capable of little else, while a man capable of watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything.")
- Aprés moi le deluge
- Farewell to a Mountain
- Therapeutic Superstition
Joukossa on aika paljon mm. kirja-arvosteluja, joista osa ei sytyttänyt.
Hart tunnustautuu universalistiksi: kaikki pelastuvat. Kiinnostavimpia olivat tätä teemaa käsittelevät esseet (mm. Augustinuksen ja Gregorius Nyssalaisen Paavali-tulkintaa ja Origenestä ja viidettä ekumeenistä kirkolliskokousta käsittelevät).
Myös rahaa sekä toisaalta sekulaarisaation ja kapitalismin suhdetta pohtivat esseet koukuttivat. Hart väittää, että sekularisaatio liittyy väistämättä läntiseen talousjärjestelmään; sekularisaatio on kuluttajahenkisen kapitalismin kulttuurinen ilmentymä. Ostan tämän ainakin osittain.
En oikein näe, kuinka läntisellä pallonpuoliskolla asuvalla teologilla olisi varaa olla lukematta DBH:ta.
Omia kohokohtiani:
- A Person you Flee at Parties (kyse siitä, miksi Saatana kuvataan kulttuurissa tyylikkäänä ja kiinnostavana -- "How then, should one portray the prince of darkness? A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos. -- That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter : the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump - though perhaps just a little nicer.")
- Hypatia Reassembled
- The Greatest Nation on Earth (vastaus: Bhutan)
- Golf and the Metaphysics of Morals ("I take it as an absolutely irrefutable maxim that a man capable of playing golf is probably capable of little else, while a man capable of watching golf with interest is probably capable of anything.")
- Aprés moi le deluge
- Farewell to a Mountain
- Therapeutic Superstition
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews