Demons have the power to cause temptations in us, and Christian materialism implies the supervenience of temptations on brain states. This in turn implies that demons bring about temptations by causally interfering with our brains. But if they have such an ability to affect the physical world, it is mysterious why they do not wreak more havoc than they do both to our brains and in the world more generally. Substance dualism provides an elegant solution: demonic temptation is not (...) a species of soul-to-brain causation, but soul-to-soul, and we don’t need to suppose demons have the power to directly affect the physical world. Materialist solutions, in contrast, are ad hoc. (shrink)

_From one of the most revered scholars of religion, an incisive explanation of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great faiths_ Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great (...) theistic faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points. Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine. (shrink)

First, this collection seeks to examine exactly what Levinass writings mean for both Jews and Christians. Second, it takes a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue, using Levinas as the rationale for the discussion. Three generations of Levinas scholars are represented. Contributors: Leora Batnitzky, Jeffrey Bloechl, Richard A. Cohen, Paul Franks, Robert Gibbs, Kevin Hart, Dana Hollander, Robyn Horner, Jeffrey L. Kosky, Jean-Luc Marion, Michael Purcell, Michael A. Signer, Merold Westphal, Elliott R. Wolfson, Edith Wyschogrod.

We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. We begin to listen well to Levinas when we hear him inviting us to break completely with the pagan world in which the gods are simply the highest beings in the cosmos and learn to practice an adult religion in which God is outside cosmology and ontology. God (...) comes to mind neither in our attempts to think him as the creator of the cosmos nor in moments of ecstasy but in acts of genuine holiness, such as sharing a piece of bread with someone in a time of desperate need. Levinas, in short, enjoins us to be exorbitant in our dealings with one another. This book asks how the "between" of Levinas's thinking facilitates a dialogue between Jews and Christians. In one sense, Levinas stands exactly between Jews and Christians: ethics, as he conceives it, is a space in which religious traditions can meet. At the same time, his position seems profoundly ambivalent. No one can read a page of his writings without hearing a Jewish voice as well a a philosophical one. Yet his talk of substitution seems to resonate with Christological themes. On occasion, Levinas himself sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity--but to what extent can his thinking become the basis for a dialogue between Christians and Jews? This book, with a stellar cast of contributors, explores these questions, thereby providing a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue. (shrink)

Unarguably, Jean-Luc Marion is the leading figure in French phenomenology as well as one of the proponents of the so-called “theological turn” in European philosophy. In this volume, Kevin Hart has assembled a stellar group of philosophers and theologians from the United States, Britain, France, and Australia to examine Marion's work—especially his later work—from a variety of perspectives. The resulting volume is an indispensable resource for scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and theology. “This is a ground-breaking book (...) by leading continental thinkers on one of the most pioneering and controversial voices to emerge in French thought in decades. This volume addresses the lynch-pin of Marion's thought—the point where philosophy and theology, gift and revelation, impossibility and grace, intersect in fascinating and arresting ways. Kevin Hart, as editor, assembles and conducts a magisterial intellectual orchestra.” —Richard Kearney, Boston College “The collective strength of these exceptionally high-quality essays is the authors’ diversity of reflection on the relation of phenomenology to theology. Readers new to Marion will find their way into the _corpus_ and those already familiar with Marion’s work will encounter stimulating interpretations, challenges, and defenses. Valuable, too, are Hart’s introduction to Marion as phenomenologist and Marion’s defense of the saturated phenomenon that bookend the volume.” —Merold Westphal, Fordham University “As a sophisticated engagement with the question of Marion’s relation to Christian theology specifically, and as a general response to Marion’s work as a whole, _Counter-Experiences_ is an undeniable success. The authors treat Marion’s texts carefully, bring impressive intellectual force to their task, and provide rich documentation in the strongest volume of work on Marion’s thought yet to appear in English.” —Jeffrey Bloechl, College of the Holy Cross. (shrink)

What happens in a conversation between a committed Atheist and a committed Christian? While agreeing to disagree on almost every detail, Kai Nielsen, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, and Hendrik Hart, Senior Member in Philosophy at the graduate Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, agree that it is not fruitless.

In this paper we discuss the question whether God intends that sin occur. We clarify the question, consider some of the answers given in the Christian tradition, and give a careful commentary on a few especially telling passages from the Christian Scriptures. We consider two philosophically informed interpretative strategies, one derived from the work of Frances Kamm, the other from Reformed scholasticism, against our interpretation of these passages. While we concede that in other passages such interpretations may allow (...) a way of escaping our argument, we conclude that in the case of the telling passages we have selected there is simply no comparably plausible alternative interpretation. (shrink)

This essay critically engages the concept of transcendence in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. I explore his definition of transcendence, its role in holding a modernity-inspired nihilism at bay, and how it is crucial to the Christian antihumanist argument that he makes. In the process, I show how the critical power of this analysis depends heavily and paradoxically on the Nietzschean antihumanism that he otherwise rejects. Through an account of what I describe as naturalistic Christianity, I argue that transcendence (...) need not be construed as supernatural, that all of the resources necessary for a meaningful life are immanent in the natural process, which includes the semiotic capacities of Homo sapiens. Finally, I triangulate Taylor's supernatural account of transcendence, naturalistic Christianity, and Dreyfus and Kelly's physis-based account of “going beyond” our normal normality in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics for Meaning in a Secular Age. (shrink)

In response to the critique of his work by William Sweet, Hendrik Hart first offers some terminological clarifications. The important difference between ‘faith’ (trust in God) and ‘belief’ (our network of accepted understandings of things, expressed in concepts and propositions) is emphasized and his use of terms such as ‘religion,’ ‘knowledge,’ and ‘truth’ are explained. Hart then clarifies his approach to the Western philosophical tradition. He argues that Christian accommodation to philosophy and its idea of ‘reason’ as (...) ultimate arbiter have hindered proper understanding of biblical faith. He finds support for his critique within the philosophical tradition itself, particularly in the form of feminist and postmodern thought. In the end, he offers a vision of religious truth, encapsulated in Jesus’ proclamation, “I am the truth,” that is based upon the embodiment of God’s will and intent. (shrink)

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book s ultimate import is (...) that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closuresomething that every orthodox theology requiresthus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart s insights open the potencies of the nothing to the actualization of freedomthe freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothingit is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend.". (shrink)

In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, (...) A. R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world. (shrink)

_A stunning reexamination of one of the essential tenets of Christian belief from one of the most provocative and admired writers on religion today__ “A scathing, vigorous, eloquent attack on those who hold that that there is such a thing as eternal damnation.”—Karen Kilby, _Commonweal___ “[A] provocative, informative treatise.... [Hart’s] resounding challenge to orthodox Christian views on hell and his defense of God’s ultimate goodness will prove convincing and inspiring to the open-minded.”—_Publishers Weekly_ (starred review)_ The great (...) fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea once observed that, in his time, most Christians believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all would eventually attain salvation. But today, this view is no longer prevalent within Christian communities. In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation. On the basis of the earliest Christian writings, theological tradition, scripture, and logic, Hart argues that if God is the good creator of all, he is the savior of all, without fail. And if he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But it is not so. There is no such thing as eternal damnation; all will be saved. With great rhetorical power, wit, and emotional range, Hart offers a new perspective on one of Christianity’s most important themes. (shrink)

Rowan Williams says that David Bentley Hart "can always be relied on to offer a perspective on the Christian faith that is both profound and unexpected." The Hidden and the Manifest, a new collection of this brilliant scholar's work, contains twenty essays by Hart on theology and metaphysics. Spanning Hart's career both topically and over time, these essays cover such subjects as the Orthodox understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice; the metaphysics of Paradise Lost; Christianity, modernity, and freedom; (...) death, final judgment, and the meaning of life; and many more. (shrink)

Does “community” contain an ineradicable memory of “communion,” and thereby inevitably have conceptual ties to Christianity, if not to fascism? Or can the word, rather, indicate a new way of being in common, one that became briefly visible in the communist experiment, understood first as the appearing of the truth of democracy before it collapsed under the weight of ideology and militarism? While Jean-Luc Nancy identifies motifs from Maurice Blanchot’s early right-wing political commitments in his later left-wing thought, this essay (...) addresses and critiques another of Nancy’s claims: that despite Blanchot’s affirmation of a community unregulated by a reference to unity, he is, in fact, committed to the Christian notion of communion. However, Blanchot distanced his notion of inter-subjectivity from any conception of God, proposing, instead, a “dissymmetric” rather than asymmetric relation, grounded in the encounter of the Other’s death rather than in some trace of the divine. (shrink)

This essay addresses the alienation of aesthetics from ethics in the context of modernity. In examining the modern development of moral theory, it offers a critique of the dominant trends within that tradition, arguing that the result is a fragmented and disordered conception of the good life. Christian ethics, grounded in a conception of the beauty of God’s being as a disclosure of the true good, can reaffirm the connection between ethics and aesthetics, that beauty is not simply a (...) matter of inward reflection but also of action toward the world, which gives content to moral life. Christian ethics ultimately requires a “sense of style” through which we are attracted to a life lived in imitation of Christ, and through which our conceptions of virtue are grounded in a desire to act in such a way as to manifest God’s beauty before the world. (shrink)

This essay seeks to explore contemplation as it features in Christian theology and philosophy, both ancient and modern. Contemplation, in ancient philosophy, is transformed in Christian theology; nonetheless, it has the structure of what Jean Wahl calls ‘transascendance’, a rising to the heights. Although contemplation remains as a theme in modern Christian theology, it drops out in modern philosophy: that is, post-Renaissance philosophy. And yet it returns, both in analytic and continental philosophy, in the twentieth century. It (...) returns, however, in the mode of ‘transdescendance’: by way of conditions of possibility, and fundamental orientations. (shrink)

Kai Nielsen’s recent book Philosophy and Atheism is discussed here. The main point is that Nielsen’s arguments against Christianity can be turned against his own rationalist atheism with similar results, namely that the position seems incoherent from its own point of view. Christianity is unempirical and irrational by certain arguments, but the position assumed underneath those arguments does not survive treatment by those same arguments. Nielsen’s dependence on arguments that undermine the position assumed in these arguments should make him open (...) to the suggestion that these arguments may not be relevant to the assessment of the validity of a religious position. (shrink)

People from Native American/First Nation spiritual traditions and from Christian religious backgrounds express sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary perspectives on humans' role in an interrelated and interdependent "web of life." The extinction of salmon species in the Columbia-Snake river system of Canada and the United States, and the loss of salmon from the Haida Gwaii fisheries off the western coast of Canada, provide bioregional stimuli for reflection on whether nonhuman species have intrinsic value or solely instrumental value, and the extent (...) to which species preservation should have equitable status with, or take precedence over, human wants and apparent human needs. If societal needs and species conservation, and the common good of all creatures, are to be integrated for the good of the commons then a relational consciousness must replace "dominion" and "stewardship" attitudes toward creation. (shrink)

In the introduction to Aquinas on Friendship, Daniel Schwartz admits that his treatment of Aquinas’s theory of friendship is not exhaustive. His central argument is that Aquinas reworks several elements of Aristotle’s view of friendship in accordance with his Christian commitment to the ideal of friendship with God and to the theological virtue of charity. Schwartz develops this argument through a detailed description of some of the elements of Aquinas’s theory, most notably the concept of concordia, along with responses (...) to the challenges posed by those elements, drawn from such luminaries as John Duns Scotus, Cicero, and St. Paul.According to Schwartz, Aquinas identifies three acts of friendship: concordia, benevolentia, and beneficentia. While he claims that these three acts represent the larger themes of the volume, its content and subject index suggest otherwise. Chapters two through four address the nature of concordia and the possible impediments to it, such as heresy, disparity of. (shrink)

This paper considers the claim that imagination is implicated in our most apparently straightforward human transactions with the world, that our 'knowing' of the world (both in experience and our subsequent symbolic ordering of it) is in some sense imaginatively constructed from the outset. Second, drawing in particular on the work of Mark Johnson, it explores the senses in which such imaginative transactions are both experience constituted and experience constitutive (that, in Ricoeur's words, imagination 'invents in both senses of the (...) word'). Third, it attends to one apparent theological cost of ascribing to human imagination a 'creative' role in relation to the human world. Fourth, it focuses in particular on Charles Taylor's account of the imaginative construction of the self as a moral entity. And finally, it considers just one example of how the arts may be active in shaping moral identity, and thereby the human world in which we live and move and have our being. (shrink)

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

Since the time of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, discussions of faith and reason have often pitted the believer against the skeptic, the theist against the atheist, and the person of one faith against the person of no professed faith. But the relation of reason to faith has been a matter of debate among believers as well. There are those who hold that religious faith can be proven or supported by rational argument. Others say that to try to give reasons (...) and arguments does violence to religious faith, or opens it to misunderstanding and doubt, or trivializes it. Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community is a dialogue between Hendrik Hart and William Sweet, two philosophers who identify themselves as Christians, and who seek to respond to the challenges of the Enlightenment and its legacy. The authors approach the relation of faith to reason, however, in very different ways: Hart from the perspective of the Calvinian tradition and postmodern philosophy, Sweet from the Catholic tradition and analytic philosophy. Among the topics discussed are the nature of religious faith and of reason, liberalism and orthodoxy in religion, the relation of religious experience and rationality, and building community in a religiously and culturally pluralistic world. This exchange presents two distinctive perspectives to some of the major challenges of the reason to religious belief, but seeks to find common ground between them. (shrink)

This article suggests that the deconstruction of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in the Letter on Humanism is a precondition for what Derrida attempts to do in his commentary of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. This preliminary deconstruction, through a constellation of Hölderlinian motifs, controls the topology of Geschlecht III and determines Derrida’s approach to the themes of “nationality” and “philosophical nationalism”.

Fackenheim was one of the most philosophically serious, knowledgeable, and provocative contemporary Jewish thinkers. His original focus as a philosophical theologian was mainly on revelation, but in his later work he concerned himself primarily with the wide-ranging implications of the Holocaust. In this book, Kenneth Hart Green examines Fackenheim's intellectual trajectory and traces how and why he focused so intently on the Holocaust. He explores the deeper thought that Fackenheim developed about the Holocaust, which he construed as a cataclysmic (...) event that ruptured history and one that also brought about a change in the very structure of being. As Green demonstrates, the Holocaust, according to Fackenheim's interpretation, changes how we view all things, from God to man to history. It also radically affects Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy, the major traditions that have shaped the Western world. (shrink)

In his lectures on the death penalty Jacques Derrida argues the surprising thesis that ‘no philosophical system as such has ever been able rationally to oppose the death penalty’. And he also entertains a second thesis that juridical execution undergirds the legal system. In his support for abolitionism, Derrida participates in ‘philosophy’ without quite belonging there. In fact, he maintains that juridical execution comes into sharper focus only when we pass from philosophy to theology. There is space for further passage (...) in this direction, perhaps, in exploring the Eucharist as ‘unbloody sacrifice’. It is regrettable that the second thesis is insufficiently established. (shrink)

In the introduction to Aquinas on Friendship, Daniel Schwartz admits that his treatment of Aquinas’s theory of friendship is not exhaustive. His central argument is that Aquinas reworks several elements of Aristotle’s view of friendship in accordance with his Christian commitment to the ideal of friendship with God and to the theological virtue of charity . Schwartz develops this argument through a detailed description of some of the elements of Aquinas’s theory, most notably the concept of concordia, along with (...) responses to the challenges posed by those elements, drawn from such luminaries as John Duns Scotus, Cicero, and St. Paul.According to Schwartz, Aquinas identifies three acts of friendship: concordia, benevolentia, and beneficentia. While he claims that these three acts represent the larger themes of the volume, its content and subject index suggest otherwise. Chapters two through four address the nature of concordia and the possible impediments to it, such as heresy, disparity of. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas argues that baptism is necessary for salvation. However, he entertains a scenario described by Ambrose of Milan, such that Emperor Valentinian II converted to Christianity and was intending to be baptized but died before the sacrament could be performed. Aquinas argues that the Emperor could have achieved salvation without being baptized with water because he desired baptism and that desire was the result of his faith in God. In this paper, I offer a short treatment of Aquinas’s view (...) of baptism, his handling of the Valentinian II case, and his arguments concerning the efficacy of the baptism of desire. I conclude with a brief discussion of Aquinas’s treatment of the case of Cornelius the centurion, which illustrates how Aquinas’s view of baptism of desire and implicit faith can apply to those individuals who have no access to or connection with the Church. (shrink)

Das Werk Friedrich Nietzsches stellt die Theologie auf eine harte Probe. Denn wird nicht mit dem Tod Gottes, den Nietzsche in seiner "Frohlichen Wissenschaft" ausrufen lasst, auch der Tod der Theologie ausgerufen? Christian Jung stellt sich dieser Frage, indem er - ausgehend von Nietzsches Fruhschrift "Uber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne" - das Werk des Philosophen und insbesondere dessen Religions- und Christentumskritik sprachphilosophisch interpretiert. Des Weiteren folgt der Autor Nietzsches Uberlegungen in den Untergang jedweder theologischen Rede hinein, um (...) jedoch entgegen Nietzsches Meinung in eben diesem Untergang der Theologie das Erscheinen einer Theologie jenseits von Theologie zu entdecken. (shrink)

In his early years, before his dialogical turn, Martin Buber studied the mystical traditions of Europe and Asia and even considered himself a mystic of sorts. The present paper examines Buber's attitude towards mysticism in the course of his intellectual and personal development, particularly before and during his transitional phase to the philosophy of dialogue. The first section details the formative impact intellectual currents around 1900 had on Buber, focussing on the Neue Gemeinschaft of the Hart brothers in Berlin (...) and Gustav Landauer. In a second step, Buber's concept of mysticism is subject to scrutiny. This is essential for understanding why he dissociated so vehemently from mysticism in his dialogical phase. The critique of mysticism in I and Thou is, therefore, the subject matter of the third and last section. (shrink)

This paper highlights the role of Lewis’ Principal Principle and certain auxiliary conditions on admissibility as serving to explicate normal informal standards of what is reasonable. These considerations motivate the presuppositions of the argument that the Principal Principle implies the Principle of Indifference, put forward by Hawthorne et al.. They also suggest a line of response to recent criticisms of that argument, due to Pettigrew and Titelbaum and Hart, 621–632, 2020). The paper also shows that related concerns of (...) class='Hi'>Hart and Titelbaum, 252–262, 2015) do not undermine the argument of Hawthorne et al.. (shrink)