David Bentley Hart

Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love) by Matteo Maria Boiardo translated by Charles Stanley Ross Parlor. 717 pp. $40 Orlando (or Roland, as he was originally called), the greatest paladin of the (mythic) court of Charlemagne, once loomed in the consciousness of Western culture at least as large as . . . . Continue Reading »

The Humor of Kierkegaard by Thomas C. Oden Princeton University Press, 328 pp. $16.95 paper. My favorite “whimsical” anecdote about a philosopher goes like this: Arthur Schopenhauer once threw an old lady down a flight of stairs. (Note how the first line immediately seizes one’s attention.) . . . . Continue Reading »

Things could conceivably be far worse. The brief ebullition of indignation that followed Janet Jackson’s rather pathetic exhibitionist display during the Super Bowl’s halftime show was no doubt sincere, but surely it was nothing compared to the fury in Poland earlier this year after . . . . Continue Reading »

The year 2003 marked the centenary of the birth of Evelyn Waugh, which Knopf has chosen to observe by reissuing all seven of his “travel” books in one handsome, inexpensive Everyman’s Library volume. Most of these titles have been out of print, or only sporadically in print, since . . . . Continue Reading »

Where Taras Bulba should be ranked among the works of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)”or, for that matter, among the monuments of European literature”is by no means settled. Ernest Hemingway called it “one of the ten greatest books of all time,” while Vladimir Nabokov, who adored . . . . Continue Reading »

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England Volume III: Accommodations. By Maurice Cowling. Cambridge University Press. 766 pp. $100. Maurice Cowling (b. 1926) has never gained wide celebrity in Britain and is all but unknown beyond its shores, even though he is arguably among the twentieth . . . . Continue Reading »

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we . . . . Continue Reading »

Among recent Christian attempts at a theology of the election of Israel, Scott Bader“Saye’s book must be accounted one of the better efforts; indeed, where it specifically addresses the theology of election, one of the best. In seeking to frame an account of God’s everlasting . . . . Continue Reading »

Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection By Louis Dupré. Eerdmans. 147 pages, $20 The nine essays that constitute this volume are all concerned, in some fashion or another, with questions of religious experience: its form, its nature, its susceptibility (or resistance) to philosophical . . . . Continue Reading »