Douthat on Hart

Ross Douthat responds to David Bentley Hart’s essay on Jung:

I agree with parts of this diagnosis, but I think it’s slightly incomplete, because I think that much of modern Gnosticism is less disenchanted and post-metaphysical than Hart implies. Having spent a fair amount of time reading the various manuals of therapeutic spirituality for  my recent book on American religion , I came away convinced that the Deepak Chopras and Eckhart Tolles and Elizabeth Gilberts are, indeed, enchanted “with the self in its particularity” — but that they’re also eager (desperately so, at times) to reconcile this enchantment with the God Within with the traditional monotheistic quest for the God Without, rather than treating one as a substitution for the other.