David Bentley Hart

Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Tibet by Trent Pomplun Oxford, 320 pages, $29.95 How many of history’s most fascinating tales go untold for want of the right teller, I wonder. There are some events that can be appreciated, or in fact even noticed, only by . . . . Continue Reading »

We are now a few weeks into the Chinese New Year (a year of the Tiger, elementally specified as metal, metaphysically specified as yang), and this seems a fairly auspicious time to pay tribute to one of my favorite of Chinese culture’s immortals … Continue Reading »

The ever slightly oafish Pat Robertson (you remember him: that fine Christian gentleman who just a few years ago defended China’s infanticidal one-child policy, lest he imperil his own lucrative business relations with the PRC by publically criticizing the regime) has opined that the earthquake in Haiti is only the most recent result of a curse that the nation contracted back in the days of Toussaint Louverture, when “they” (that is, apparently, all the Haitians and their posterity) conducted a ceremony in which “they” made a deal with the devil, promising him their allegiance in exchange for liberation from the French… . Continue Reading »

(Tens of thousands of Haitians have already died in the wake of the devastating earthquake on Tuesday, and tens of thousands more are threatened by disease and a lack of food and clean water. We thought this would be an appropriate moment to revisit David B. Hart’s essay from the March 2005 issue of First Things, written in light of the tsunami that devastated the South Asian coastline in December 2004.) Continue Reading »

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins Free Press, 480 pages, $30 The first lesson to be learned from Richard Dawkins’ new book is a purely practical maxim: One should always do what one does best, while scrupulously avoiding those tasks for which neither nature . . . . Continue Reading »

This is, in a sense, a footnote or an addendum to a column I wrote a few months ago for First Things Online called “The Gnostic Turn.” For my sins, I suppose, I subjected myself last week to all six hours (counting commercials) of the AMC/ITV attempted remake of the late 1960s television series The Prisoner. To persons d’un certain âge there should be little need to explain what the original series was. Somewhat dated in some of its features now, perhaps, and not to everyone’s taste, it was probably”at its best”the most perfectly realized fantasy ever to appear within the deadening confines of episodic television drama… . Continue Reading »

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of crisis for Christian belief. In part, this was simply the result of a long process of secularization”political, social, and intellectual”and in perhaps larger part the result of new theories and new discoveries in the sciences… . Continue Reading »

As the feast of All Souls nears, spare a piteous thought, if you will, for the poor Rev. Robert Kirk, who lived from 1644 to 1692, and whose mortal remains rest”or do they?”in his parish kirkyard in Aberfoyle, a Scottish village lying near the Laggan River and at the foot of Craigmore. The great slab of his gravestone is in much the same condition as most of the other funerary markers that survive from the seventeenth century in those latitudes… Continue Reading »

The received wisdom has it that only Nixon could have gone to China, and I imagine that in this case the received wisdom is right. By the same token, though, I hope it will one day be recognized that only Barack Obama could go to China by stabbing the Dalai Lama in the back. That day will be long in coming, no doubt… . Continue Reading »

I suppose it would sound somewhat bigoted of me to say that readers should be suspicious of journalists with an appetite for Large Ideas, but I intend no insult. The journalist’s chief vocation is to elucidate, simplify, and synopsize”to reduce a story to its most elementary logic. All . . . . Continue Reading »