The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays Quotes

“one must pause to observe that he might perhaps have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them. It seems to me that here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified god (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling sadly does not: the unanticipated lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing first to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still then elects to turn away.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

“Every attempt of the rational mind to find the truth of things involves an implicit metaphysical presupposition: that there is some transcendent coincidence of world and soul, some original fullness of reality where they are always already one, which allows for their openness one to the other here below.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

“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.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

“But it is wise to recall that the Christ of the gospels has always been—and will always remain—far more disturbing, uncanny, and scandalously contrary a figure than we usually like to admit.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

“Many American Christians, though, have a special talent for elevating the blandest and most morally nugatory aspects of social and economic life to the status of positive spiritual goods, essentially laudable, and somehow all of a piece with the teachings of Christ.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

“The ease with which Americans often confuse their civic and fiscal values with Christian virtues is always a little baffling,”
― David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays