David Bentley Hart

Hart notes that most of his ancestors lived in Maryland for generations since their arrival there in 1634.

Hart grew up with two older brothers and writes that this "has always made me feel more like a Creature of the 1960's and early 1970's than do some of my friends of roughly my age."

Hart writes that "regional pride dictated that the tender souls of schoolchildren be regularly exposed to the works of H. L. Mencken" and that this shaped his own writing style so that he would spend his life "striving to suppress my assassin's smile while heaping one elaborately vituperative subordinate clause atop another."

Outside the high school curriculum, Hart took up French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and modern Greek.

At the University of Maryland, Hart studied classics, history, world literature, religious studies and philosophy while also learning to read Chinese and Sanskrit.

As a teenager, Hart started to read the early church fathers along with contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians, converting to Orthodoxy at the age of twenty-one.

Hart earned a B.A. in interdisciplinary study from the University of Maryland, a M.Phil.

in theology from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia.

He taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Maryland.

He also served as visiting professor at Providence College where he held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture.

David Bentley Hart (born February 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian.

Reviewers have commented on Hart's baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as nineteen books (including translations).

From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one.

His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation.

Books with wider audiences include The Doors of the Sea, Atheist Delusions, and That All Shall Be Saved.

Born and raised in Maryland, Hart regularly references his family roots and the Baltimore Orioles in his writing.

Hart graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary study from the University of Maryland, completed an MPhil in theology at Cambridge University, and then a PhD in religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Born in Howard County and graduating from Wilde Lake High School in 1982 with classes in Latin and Greek, Hart was a National Merit Scholar.

Since the late 1990s, Hart has published hundreds of essays on varied subjects including Don Juan, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Segalen, Leon Bloy, William Empson, David Jones, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1893), and baseball.

Hart's academic books include The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003), The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013), The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017), That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019), Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame, 2020), Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Baker, 2022), and You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, 2022).

These often provocative essays have appeared in First Things (2003 to 2020), The New Atlantis, Commonweal, Aeon, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other periodicals.

Several of these have shaped future books such as The Doors of the Sea, Roland in Moonlight, and Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009).

Since May 2021, Hart also writes regular essays for his Leaves in the Wind subscription newsletter.

This newsletter also features conversations with other writers such as Iain McGilchrist, Rainn Wilson, China Miéville, Richard Seymour, Tariq Goddard, and Salley Vickers.

Ed Simon writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2022 said that "Hart is often difficult for some people to categorize" with his "thousands of essays, reviews, and papers" but that "what's agreed upon is that he's wide-ranging and deeply read in his seemingly limitless interests, and loquacious in his refreshingly baroque prose style" as well as "the rare theologian" who can "poetically invoke" beauty with descriptions of color and light.

Hart's style has been praised for "its thought and humor and spleen" and called "extremely rude."

Martyn Wendell Jones has said of Hart's style that, while it may "constantly verge on the immoderate" and rarely "make a point squarely without infusing a bit of accelerant," what might be seen as "needless indulgence" is also "an act of generosity toward his readership" because "his maximalist impulses ...enable him to consistently generate interest on the level of his individual sentences."

During the 2014–2015 academic year, Hart was Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University in the Department of Theological Studies.

His translation in collaboration with John R. Betz of Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm by Erich Przywara was published in 2014 by Eerdmans.

Hart received the Templeton Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study in 2015.

In 2015, he was appointed as Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

As part of this Templeton Fellowship work, Hart organized a conference focused on the philosophy of mind.

In an April 19, 2023 email, Hart noted that he is currently a collaborative research scholar at the University of Notre Dame.

His primary areas of research have been philosophical theology, systematics, patristics, classical and continental philosophy, and South and East Asian religion with recent focus on the genealogy of classical and Christian metaphysics, ontology, the metaphysics of the soul, and the philosophy of mind.

Hart has authored eighteen books and produced two translated works.

Hart's translation of the New Testament was published in 2017 with a second edition in 2023.

Five of his books have received awards or book of the year recognitions.

Hart has written essays on diverse topics such as art, baseball, literature, consciousness, the problem of evil, apocatastasis, theosis, fairies, film, and politics.

Hart maintains a subscription newsletter called Leaves in the Wind that features original essays and conversations with other thinkers.

The New Testament: A Translation was published in 2017 with Yale University Press and a second edition in 2023.