The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss - Hardcover

Hart, David Bentley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300166842 ISBN 13: 9780300166842

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Author:

Praise for David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions
 
[A] major work by one of the most learned, forceful, and witty Christian theologians currently writing.” First Things
 
With impressive erudition and polemical panache, David Hart smites hip and thigh the peddlers of a new atheism’ that recycles hoary arguments from the past. His grim assessment of our cultural moment challenges the hope that the Christian revolution’ could happen again.” Richard John Neuhaus
 
Hart has the gifts of a good advocate. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. He exposes his opponents’ errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision.” Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement
 
[This book] takes no prisoners in its response to fashionable criticisms of Christianity.” Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Church Times
 
Atheist Delusions will be remembered as Hart’s breakout book. His contributions to such journals as First Things have long marked him as a rising public intellectual. . . . Hart’s work is now likely to come to the attention of a wider audience. And not a moment too soon." William J. Portier, Commonweal
 
 

About the Author:

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0300166842
• ISBN 13: 9780300166842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 365