Christianity has never really taken deep root in America


“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”

David Bentley Hart

A Brief Conversation With David Bentley Hart | Keith Giles


“The Kingdom has drawn near, the exuberantly zealous seize it with enthusiasm, but everyone—zealous or not—is being pressed into it one way or another.”

Source: A Brief Conversation With David Bentley Hart | Keith Giles

Believe It or Not by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things


I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, 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.

Source: Believe It or Not by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things

Condemned to Salvation: Considering Universalism with David Bentley Hart – Los Angeles Review of Books


Hart implores that the traditional doctrines of eternal damnation are “morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked,” Los Angeles Review of Books

Source: Condemned to Salvation: Considering Universalism with David Bentley Hart – Los Angeles Review of Books

Traditio Deformis by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things


David Bentley Hart

The long history of defective Christian scriptural exegesis occasioned by problematic translations . . . .

Source: Traditio Deformis by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things