YouSaid · the spoken record

David Bentley Hart

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-07-12
most recent: 2023-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, what I'll do, I have several projects going on at any given time. I've got a volume of short stories coming out at some point. I've got to finish a second, a sequel to a children's book I wrote with my son. We're writing the sequel. All of a sudden I have a book on philosophy of mind that's almost finished, that's coming out from Yale. I'm never just doing one thing at a time because I'm too jittery. If I concentrate on just one task at a time, I get depressed.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we do have to rethink what exactly it is we're talking about when we talk about religion. The other thing, I guess, because I published that book a couple years ago that all shall be saved is radically Christians radically need to rethink and go back to the original text and go back to the first century and rethink this grotesque notion of an eternal hell.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relations with other faiths. I think that we need radically to rethink the very category of religion that we've inherited in the modern age, this sort of anthropological notion that these are systems of propositions opposed to one another rather than, as the ancient view would be. Religion was a virtue that all human beings practiced in greater or lesser degree with greater or lesser understanding. But, you know, for instance, I don't write much theology anymore, but when I do, I draw, even if it's Christian theology, I'm quite happy to draw infedic sources from India if they illuminate a question for me.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, all the things I write about I write about there it's not about one thing in particular over the years I've built up a readership that's literary criticism philosophy theology fiction that you didn't mention that at the beginning I've also published five or six volumes of fiction so there's sometimes short stories show up on it this year I've been recording conversations with other writers and you know it's for people just like to read without necessarily knowing what the topic's going to be in the next post.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I still pretty much live in a different century in that regard. I do. I mean, I won't pretend that I watch television ever. I do. I was fairly hooked on better call, for instance, and breaking bad before that. But it's mostly books. I don't have a lot of subscriptions to magazines. I don't like social media at all. I don't like the internet even though I have a substack newsletter. But I see that as just a subscription magazine digital form rather than print.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, I know some Britonic Celtic languages. I don't know if I'm forgetting anything or not. When I was an undergraduate and thought I might be doing Native American studies, I worked on spoken Cheyenne, Titsu, to be precise, but that's pretty rusty.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, with varying degrees of competency, Western and Eastern English, but of course French, German, Spanish, Italian, not bad at Portuguese. Let's see. I mean, I'm lousy but competent in Russian. I had to study Hebrew, Syriac in theology. I had Greek and Latin from early on. studied and I don't consider myself. A master of, but I can read now among Asian languages, Sanskrit, Pali, classical Chinese, although I find it so gnomic at times. It's hard to be sure that you get the meaning right. It's amazing how many really variant readings you can get of the same, say, Chinese poem by Li Bai, you know, the same line. It comes out completely differently for different. And I'm still working at my Japanese.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow absorb it without having to master the grammar first and then speak it like a native. I knew a fellow like that at Cambridge who now, still alive, has like 32 languages under his belt.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just, I don't know, just studied them. See, the thing is, I know better linguists than myself in the sense that I know people who can learn to speak a language in like a few months and speak it as if they were native. Because of the way my brain is constructed, I have to learn the grammar first, do it, learn the syntax and then learn it on paper and then learn to speak it. I mean, except for like the things I got early in school. I mean, you go to French class and Spanish class and you speak it before you really immerse yourself in the grammar. But my approach to most language, which is like the approach I had to Latin and Greek as a kid, I learned the grammar. So I think that whatever the case, I have a talent for languages, but I don't have, I still envy those who can just”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Thank you, using the actual Metronome markings of Beethoven. Absolute revelation, you know, hearing the music, realizing that, yeah, it has all of the grandeur and fire and power of Beethoven, but also has the lightness of Mozart, you know, the quickness, the agility. So there are a lot of great recordings of Beethoven, but I am really glad we got over the almost Wagnerian approach to Beethoven that was in place well up through the 1950s.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, very good. Okay For original instruments. If the recording were better, I like actually believe it or not, the Roy Goodman performances. They're just too many. I mean, there you're dealing with a repertoire that's been recorded so many times that the virtues of different recordings, I mean, you have to choose something a bit more recherche. But among the, I mean, everything after they got over the ponderous, overly romantic style of Tuscanini and Fort Wangler and all that got back to, Carrion made it more genuinely classical. And then the original instruments approach where they actually used who's, I'm trying to think how the British conductor who did those wonderful recordings using Dr. Norrin.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, I don't have a single one for, I think, the second Deutsche Gramophone series with Carion for modern instruments for”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gregs or Weinberg in Russia, Hensa in Germany. No, I don't have a single favorite composer. Messien would be one I love quite a lot, yeah.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is too period of extraordinary riches. I love Takamitsuturo, you know, I love, I think the wonderful thing about the 20th century was it was age of global music. It was an age which composers were allowed to draw in the past and at the same time working in new idioms. Benjamin Britton would write neoclassically. He would write, he even wrote some serial pieces, you know, 12 tone row. He would write atonely. It all sounds like Benjamin Britton. It's all wonderful. Or then he would draw for the Prince of the Pagodas. He would draw on Javanese Gamalan. You know, I love that. I love the music, the great composers of the 20th century. There was some rubbish. I mean, you couldn't pay me to listen to Storkhausen, but there are all these wonderful composers that get overlooked because of the decline of the cultural centrality. So, you know, figures like Nikos Scalcotos and others.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very unfair because the late 20th century, the second half of the 20th century was a period of no particular style. So they're composers who are neoclassical or neo-Romantic as well as the cutting-edge avant-garde. I don't have a single favorite. I love Stravinsky. I love Ray Vaughan Williams, you know. I mean,”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalized or add wholly to, you know, and when you go back to the Greek, it's simply not there. It's not talking that in that clear and precise way with all those distinctions in place. It's a much more mysterious word and it's very difficult to put it in context from verse to verse to verse. And in some places, you know that the plural meanings are intended. I had to use footnotes.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not clear that he makes the distinction that later tradition may, in fact, he doesn't. He clearly doesn't. That is the divine spirit and human spirit are absolutely separate realities. They're not. In Paul, they often are one and the same or only slightly differentiated or differentiated within a prior unity. And you see this picked up in very early theology, like someone like Irenaeus, for whom the human spirit is just the divine spirit. There's no difference really to speak of between human and divine spirit. And then the way later translations dealt with this was again and again to make decisions that here spirit means the Holy Spirit, which we understand as in later Nicene terms, as one of the co-equal persons of the Trinity. Here, spirit means human spirit.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question or Theos, God with the article, as opposed to Thaos, but that's not the only one. You see, there's a cluster of words here, panavma, the spirit, in the sense that there you're dealing with a word that in different contexts can just mean life or breath or the spirit or the spirit of God or the spirit in you. And sometimes is used to mean all those things at once because the very concept of spirit antiquity, especially when there was an influence of, say, Stoic metaphysics, was of a kind of element that on the one hand was intellectual, on another was physical. It was like the wind really can be called pineva without it necessarily meaning something drastically different from spirit when we're speaking of intelligence or mind. Because when you actually get to the way it's used in the New Testament mysteriously, say by Paul, it's”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Project because it's simply not there. It does not, it is not that kind of book. It is not an index of propositional content.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're fools if we think we understand it, but I think even though I knew this more than ever I came to appreciate the sheer diversity even in the first generation of Christians. I mean, this is not a unified text. It doesn't reflect a unified theology. What it reflects is many different reactions to an event of extraordinary mystery and power for those who are writing about it, at least especially when you're dealing, say, with the Poline literature, which is very early and the Gospels too are drawn from earlier strata of Christian literature. I mean, some of the later stuff like 2 Peter, there you're already well into a period of hardening factions. But I think the thing that I came away with is that every attempt to ground absolute doctrine, fixity of dogma in the text is an absurd.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual genius, even then the King James should not be used for theology. It's great literature, it's great liturgy, it's better than many later translations, far more accurate, say, than a piece of rubbish like the new international version. But it's still a lot of its translation is based on later Christian doctrine rather than on what the Greek actually says.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the lowest common denominator wins out, and that usually means the tacitly approved theology of the most unimaginative and historically uninformed faction in the committee. And there's a concern not to offend against people's piety, even when the text itself, so you get translations that are not warranted by the Greek and they're not warranted by the history of the time in which the text appeared, but nonetheless are chosen because they don't offend against people's theological expectations. And that's simply, I think, true of every now, you see, the King James is an exception only because it's based on the Tyndale translation. It wasn't really a committee project. The committee simply dotted the I's, crossed the T's, fixed a few things, did some good. But that was first and foremost the work of...”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's awful. Just very bad. I just think it's barely literate. I think it's very inaccurate. I say this not as someone. I think she's done other translations that are quite wonderful. I think her translation of Augustine is the best in modern English, but I think her insistence on translating philologically in the sense that taking the meaning of words from their roots and doing other things of that sort all the way through was horribly ill-advised. And I think she also just doesn't know the period very well. She's a classicist in one sense, but late antiquity and certainly Second Temple Judaism and late anti-Christianity are just not in her wheelhouse. And there are just so many things that she gets wrong. And I just think it reads exceedingly badly. I don't know what I agree with Luke Timothy John.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was always being couched in terms of economic development, world power and all that. So I chose the most isolated, most sort of militantly rural, the most unworldly. Now, after doing that, of course, I had to say, well, then again, when I looked at it again, like the treatment of Nepalese refugees in Bhutan was anything but admirable and all that. But at the time, I was making a joke about what constitutes national greatness. And so the notion that you have a country that didn't have any television in it up until like a decade ago and only needed one stoplight. And then in the whole country, and then they removed it because it offended their aesthetic sense. It just seemed like a funny column at the time. But if you made it by really willing to go to the mat defending Bhutan against... All its critics know, no, that was a satire.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, that's a satirical piece that was written so long ago that I'm surprised that anyone remembers it. The joke being it was a period when people were talking about American greatness. This is well before Trump and everything. I mean, this was something”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it all depends on which era. And of course, there's the stuff I grew up with. And so I would have said Mr. Tambourine man up until, and then Blind Willie McTell is sort of his revival period, you know, infidels. And then I like a lot of the stuff and oh mercy. The man in the black coat. So I'm afraid he's been around too long. You really have to say what's the best vintage Dylan? What's the best middle period, Dylan? What's the best revival middle period Dylan? What's the best late period? But if I had to choose one to be played while my corpse is being”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I disagree there actually. I kind of liked the angels turning out to be real angels. But then again, it's been so long since I saw it. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm misremembering how it ended.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The matrix things, which were the not very good films, but the Truman Show, which is just a pure Gnostic allegory. Gattica done by the same fellow. And in television too, I mean, as far as I know, I don't, she said, I don't watch enough to know, but I did a few years ago, what was the Battle Star Galactic of the sci-fi version? I actually got hooked on that and watched it through. There are plenty of Gnostic themes in that.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not quite sure what your politics are, so I have no concern one way or the other about how it's viewed in regard to progressivism. I mean, I'm a socialist. I'm not a liberal, but I'm definitely a socialist. My concern about, and Gnosticism and his classical statements, to the degree there was such a thing. I want to point out that in scholarly terms, who knows, there's so many different schools that we've simply stuck together and called Gnostic that when you actually look at them, the details, much of what we call Gnosticism is just actually Pauline or Johannine Christianity in the New Testament restated with an overlay of fabulism. I think the honest, there's been kind of a vogue of Gnosticism. In popular culture. Where you'd expect it, but there have been lots of films”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just got the impression that it shows the therapeutic over the Gnostic. That is that in the original program it was consciously at times a Gnostic allegory. In fact, there was one episode called The Dance of the Dead that just explicitly sort of invokes a Gnostic language of that somehow were imprisoned in a false reality and that we should long for the really real at whatever cost and should seek to escape from delusion. Whereas the new version simply says that in a sense maybe there is no truth at all, there is no right side or wrong side, there's just the need for therapy to help us deal with a sense of alienation or discontent and that of those two options I prefer the former.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the new version he saves the village and turns it into a kind of psychotherapeutic spa that some people require in place of the reality of this world. I found that a sublimely nihilistic conclusion. So the way it should have ended is the way it originally ended, not the way the remake ended it.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, now that's an interesting question. The last episode, I will admit, is a bit of a disappointment, but I think it ended properly. I mean, I think Patrick McGoen made his point that number one is the self that we imprison ourselves before anyone else can imprison us. So I think the last episode would have been better had it been written as well as the one just before it. But, you know, you can't have everything. I'm contented with the way it went out. This seems like a minor and a silly question, but it is true. You know, they did a remake. For AMC of the prisoner some years ago, in the original, of course, number six, he escapes. Now, his escape is an absolute because he goes back home and it turns out still to be, in some sense, the village. He is still the prisoner of himself. But he destroys the village, right?”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, you know, what would be good? What would be bad? There are people I know, in fact, people near here in Notre Dame who are all terrific intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom because they think that would be the revival of Christianity in the West and they ally themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orban, whereas I, my ideal of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of conflation of Christianity with the interests of particular civilization or culture or nation. I believe that's a perfidious corruption. So bright in what way? I would say that in many ways the brightest future for Christianity might consist in the death of Many of its institutions and of much of its cultural power”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, in some cases, yeah, in some cases not. I mean, it depends on what you're talking about in particular. I think that we have learned both on the, I think in America, but also in the West as such, just to a pathological degree at America, on both right and left, we've learned to start all of our I don't know if this has always been the case. I mean, there have been apocalyptic moments in American history before. I mean, we had a Civil War, for instance. But at the present, it seems like both extremes speak in such strident tones of moral indignation that it is tempting to think that they're speaking out of a dogmatic impulse rather than a rational one, that there is a kind of religious intonation in the worst sense in our politics on all sides.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it doesn't seem that way when you read that there's some powerful spiritual apprehension that he is discovered about the love of God and the grace of God and that over many decades of self-sacrificing life leading ultimately to his death, he lays that out. Well, that's compelling to me in a way that other sorts of claims that seem more incredible aren't.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know why you keep bringing up Mormonism. I mean, I have absolutely no connections. I've never written about it. My only connection, I've met a few nice Mormons. I've read the Book of Mormon once. I didn't find it particularly well written, but neither for that matter is most of the New Testament. And I think it's based on historical claims that are objectively false. that they're these ancient civilizations in the Americas that just didn't exist. I think the story of the Genesis of the Book of Mormon is a bit more incredible than, say, somebody in the first century writing down what his theology is based on In the case of Paul, obviously a person whose life was turned upside down by some kind of experience, maybe he was a psychotic, I don't know.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, whose test? I mean, come on. I mean, the Book of Mormon is supposedly read off from these golden plates that Joseph Smith was shown able to read with magical spectacles, plates that no one else ever saw. So, you know, that's very much a kind of story that if you want to believe it, you can. But that's not, and maybe you can say the same about everyone's testimony. I mean, the judgments you have to make at times just no one's testimony should be taken as an absolute authority. No one's because no one is free from psychological limitation. So even if he or she is perfectly sincere, that in itself doesn't prove anything. But you can make judgments on character. You can make judgments about coherence. These are, again, a relative judgments. They're not absolute. I think that when the story becomes...”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I don't know. Some of them, I think, are quite compelling. I mean, especially the ones that involve being able to reconstruct facts surrounding the moment of death that you shouldn't have been able to know, like who was out in the hallway, things like that. You can't completely deny that. But at the same time, I think also that you're dealing with a moment of transition in which it's very hard to separate the psychological from the objective. So I wouldn't dismiss them. Many of them, as I say, are quite compelling. But how much you can learn from them?”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychological self, but nonetheless that's a more substantial sense of the meaning of reincarnation. Within those systems, yeah, they make perfect sense. But again, people tend to think they know what these terms mean when you actually look at the traditions. They have to be qualified and modified and explained at length because you can't step out of an entire world of presuppositions and beliefs and concepts and just take One thing like that, Punabafa again becoming, I'm just choosing to use the Buddhist term and think you understand what's going on as if you could just transpose it into say, oh, I'm a Presbyterian and I know what this means because you can't do that.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within the systems in which systems you're talking about in Buddhism isn't about the reincarnation of a psychological ego. It has to do with an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising. So there you're dealing with one notion. The versions that you find in Vedanta and Bhakti and other things that we call Hinduism or also in Sikhism or Jainism, in which the Jiva, something that is a kind of soul passes over. Even that's not”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding and relationship. I don't think that's Bayesian so much as it's not a leap of faith in the vulgar sense, but it is a venture of faith in the sense that you can't start with all the, you can't start with perfect wisdom and knowledge. You are making... Rational judgments, and again, rationality is not a single univocal sort of thing. It can also have to do with intuitions, like moral intuitions. If you come up against a doctrine or a teaching or something that is repugnant to your moral reasoning, then that is significant. And it would be deplorable of you to choose to believe it despite the counsels of your moral reasoning, unless you had really good reasons to think you'd been mistaken.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A finite entity exists, right? So any rational arguments you have about God are based on usually a kind of modal metaphysics of the absolute and the contingent or so on and so forth. And there, I think reason should be fully engaged. The question is within a tradition. That's when things become a bit more stochastic. It's like, you know, is this, I can start if I don't start from the premise that when I speak of God, that is that there's an absolute source and end to all things, then I'm not really interested in the question of religion at all. But if I believe that may be true, if I have a sense of it, or if reason tells me it's so, that it doesn't make sense to believe in a pure physicalism or materialism, then where faith is engaged is in trying to make rational judgments about who can point you towards a deeper.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're actually God. Faith is the question of existence of God. I mean, that's not what I was talking about when I talk about faith. I meant a path towards the sacred there. First of all, just to define what the word existence means because God would not exist in the way that an individual”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just it's meaningless, it's just a brute exertion of the will, at which point it's sub-rational and becomes contemptible. Always trust reason. But make sure that reason is tempered. It's not petty rationalism, but it's a reason that really can see things in broad perspective and understand in a variety of modalities don't treat reason as if it's a math equation.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is more likely to lead to safety and the other to the edge of a cliff. You take that path, but you don't take it so credulously that you'll walk off the edge of a cliff if you come to the cliff, that the act of faith is a way of engaging the mind, engaging reason, so it can explore. If you don't start with some sort of trust, some sort of the possibility of discovering the truth, then you never will seek the truth to begin with. But that search requires a kind of combination of a degree of rational judgment and a degree of trust, and you hope that the two prove to be in harmony. If they're not, though, if you reach a point where your faith and your reason come into conflict, then trust your reason. Always trust your reason because otherwise faith is just epistemic nihilism, nihilism, sorry, pronouncing the word both ways today is”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the West, or when you talk about peace in Greek or Srada in Sanskrit or any number of other words for faith, it usually means a kind of rational commitment to a certain path for which you have reasons, but those reasons in themselves don't necessarily arrive at a QED, but that as you advance on this path, you're hoping, at least, things become clearer and clearer and you understand better whether you really believe it or not. But you have to commit yourself to the path in order to find a way. You know, the American philosopher William James spoke of the will to believe, and he's often misunderstood if all he was saying was it's okay to choose arbitrarily to believe something. That's not what he said. What he said was when you, you know, it's as if you're in the fog, say, and you encounter two paths, and you have a sense that one”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be because even if you choose faith, you're choosing to believe something for reasons, even if you're not able to name those reasons yourself some sort of compelling rational intuition has worked upon you to say, well, I believe I can trust this source more than that source. So you may say that, oh, I'm having faith in what it's telling me, but you're having faith in that rather than something else, because at some level, maybe a tacit level that you'd have a hard time laying out, you've somehow reached the judgment and it would have to be a rational judgment if your faith is of any meaning that you trust this rather than that. So I would say that, but you know, what is faith? I mean, when you create a sort of division between faith and reason, you're assuming that faith is taking things simply on the authority of another blindly. But that's never actually been the definition that any religion, I mean, whether you're talking”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“even within the history of Judaism before Christianity, it's a one covenant superseding another, then Christians claim that they've superseded the covenant in some sense. And then Islam is a supersession of the revelation with yet another revelation. So this seems to be just part and parcel of the whole Western Abrahamic or the whole Abrahamic religious tradition. So I suppose I would say that Mormonism is just another example of that kind of new claim of a new revelation.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book of more. I have no opinions about it whatsoever. It's kind of silly. That's the way it comes across to me. But I've only read it once and the Bible, if you say the Bible lends itself to spin-offs, I mean, any religion that has... Tendencies towards the collapse of the difference in significance between history and eternity. Is always likely to inspire new historical projects that consider themselves. I mean, after all, This is something of the Abrahamic religions that they're sort of supersessionists in the way they proceed. I mean, even.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is committed to a kind of set of real democratic norms, and Poland there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source