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

“Had certain advantages to begin with, too, but yeah, I mean, better relations. Again, I don't think it has any particular, to be honest, I mean, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. I mean, there you're going to find that culturally Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West. They're trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories I just think is a mistake. There's no way of saying one way or the other. I mean, Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while. I mean, after the Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox too, and it's even more than Poland.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My suspicion is this is mostly historical accident, the cultural tendencies toward reaction in the East are mostly, I just have to do with the material conditions and the political histories and the relative material isolation from the huge period of Western European expansion of wealth, expansion of power and ferment of social change and new ideas. It was simply the case that after the Middle Ages early modernity Western Europe was the center of economic and political power in the Western world.”
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 if orthodoxy as such is the issue, but I mean, the history of those nations was radically different in any number of ways. Some of them, in the case, say, of most of the Slavic nations, have simply retained habits of governance and habits of social organization that go back to a very pre-democratic past. I don't know if there's any causal relationship between the kind of Christianity because, of course, Western democratic institutions tended to go hand in hand with some degree of laicization, some degree of secularization. I mean, for the whole point of the French Revolution would be the overthrow of the Alcean regime, which is both state and church. You're dealing with a kind of absolutist Gallican church in a sense that”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evangelicalism plus saints and incense. And so I would say that I don't think, you know, the only way in which the Orthodox communities have successfully resisted this is also the degrees to which many of them have remained redoubts of ethnic identity. And that's not much better, that too. So I would say on the whole the jury is still out. I think Orthodoxy in America may very well just be another American religion at the end of the day, another generation or two, and it won't be the only distinctions will be in liturgical form.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the result is that many who come into the church come with presuppositions formed in very radically different tradition. I mean, fundamentalist evangelicalism is a much narrower understanding of how much speculation is possible. They're not really prepared to look at a 2,000 year history and see all the varieties, you know, well, this is the patristic period, and here's the scholastic, the Russian religious philosophers of the 19th century were very different. And able to recognize that a huge variety of views is, instead, they tend to think in terms of a faith statement of the sort that an evangelical church. And to be honest, that's become such a dominant faction and so much American Orthodoxy that much of American Orthodoxy is intellectually and temperamentally and socially and culturally just American.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For any number of reasons. One, there's been a huge influx of former evangelicals into American Orthodoxy, but the problem is as Orthodoxy doesn't have, most of the communions, unlike the Catholic Church, doesn't have a protocol for receiving converts that's very clear. I mean, they just, so you come to the liturgy, you ask questions, and after a year or so, you're chrismated or something.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on which church you're talking about contrapuntal polyphonic music actually has a very rich history in the Russian and the Slavic tradition, especially from the time of Bort Jansky and others onward. I don't think so now. Those sorts of differences, those sorts of accidental differences, those are the things that Orthodox polemicists like to focus on. Every little difference becomes a difference of incredible magnitude for those who are looking for reasons to dislike the other camp. But no, I don't think there's any significant theological difference there. And the Slavic tradition, as I say, is highly contrapuntal. You know, Rachmanoff's church music.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failure to receive a super elevating grace. Grace is, how do I put it this? In Western tradition, grace became a very extraordinary gift, whereas in the East it remained an ordinary reality from which we were extraordinarily separated by a tragic history that had to be overcome.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the books, but unlike Calvinism, Roman Catholicism doesn't insist that it knows what predestination means. But the real big difference, I suppose then the greatest difference would be the theology of grace. I mean, that in the West it became more and more the case that grace was sort of treated as antithetical to nature. Grace was a principle over against nature. It was therefore given according to a kind of purely predilective predestining will of God, whereas in the East, that kind of opposition between grace and nature simply never took root. Grace was just a word for the way God deals with creatures, and it was seen as more continuous with nature, that we're always already naturally oriented to union with God, and that it's an unnatural impediment that separates us from God rather than a”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In as few dimensions as possible. Well, for one thing, there's no history of the notion of inherited guilt. The whole idea of sin is very different. We're sort of born into a state of alienation from God and from the world and from our neighbor is a common Christian idea. But in the West, mostly just as a result of certain translation issues, but also because of the very powerful influence of the late Augustine on the development of Western theology, there came that somehow one is born in a state of guilt, which, to be honest, was often was considered repugnant in the East. Also, there was no theology then of predestination. This is often also regarded as, and there was in Western Catholicism, albeit it's a doctrine without a strict definition. It remains”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think in left field that Earl Weaver was one of the first really platoon players, and sometimes Beaufort actually played the infield. He was a much more versatile player. But yeah, I think Ratman was still on the team too.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merv Retamund, or well, let's see, there would also be Don Buford sometimes played left. Trying to remember, Paul Blair was in center still, and that was the last year that Frank Robinson was in Wright field. So if my memory is correct, it was usually Merv Rettamund or maybe the young Don Baylor was up then. I'm getting old now. Do you know?”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any connection there, and since no one's ever asked me this before, I'm not sure there is, but if there is, then you can see how someone who takes seriously the genealogy of nihilism that someone like Heidegger unfolds might be drawn to a very robust among Christian traditions, a very robust depiction of a kind of glorified reality in which the Participates in the sacred mystery.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree with the whole story, but as I say, it makes one think about the genealogy of the way we see the world and see the world as desacralized and disenchanted, and that much of the appeal of, I suppose, Eastern Orthodoxy to me in my youth was precisely that it was Christian tradition that emphasized precisely the sense of cosmic mystery of Christ and the cosmic mystery of the revelation of God in all things and put this great emphasis on the notion that the heart of Christian thought as the idea of deification, of union with God, of a whole creation renewed in some unimaginable way so that a very popular image goes so that the whole universe is like a burning bush, you know, shining with the glory of God, but not consumed.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when he wasn't being evil, he was very reflective philosopher on how we have arrived at what he considered an age of nihilism, of sort of an age that values the will to power, the will to power over physical environment above all other things without any sense of the mystery of being, the piety of not trying to grasp and control and reduce all of reality to instrumentality and utility. And he tells a very powerful story about the genealogy of Western nihilism, how we arrived at what he calls the age of technology in which everything is simply a project of the will and the whole of the world is nothing but a reserve of resources to be exploited for the purpose of acquisition and for the purposes of the will.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's well, he's one of them. The philosophers. Well, now there you're dealing, I have to admit this question comes a little out of left field, but with me, I never know which aspect of my work someone might be interested in at a given moment. But with Heidegger, it's very ambiguous figure, of course, but he certainly was putting aside his own incredible moral defects, for those who don't know, he was a member for a while of the Nazi Party, as much out of cowardice as anything else, but I think out of early on at least some degree of sympathy.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the sort of violent projects of the ego. But at its worst, it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's been both good and bad, to be honest, I mean, at its best, Orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity, the self-denial. At its worst, however, it's often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel too. I mean, it's often been the case that orthodoxy has been so Say, disenchanted with the millinarian expectation that it's become a prop of the state, and you can see today in Russia in which you have a church institution. This isn't to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state, of the institution, rather, of the church, more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orthodoxy is sort of created for itself a kind of parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, whereas it still uses the language, recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it's not at the center of the spiritual life.”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in one sense, it's been the case of Christianity from the first century that it's always existed in a kind of time between times, right? There's always this sense of being in history, but always expecting an imminent interruption of history. But orthodoxy has been around for a while. It's part of an indurated culture of grounded originally in the eastern Greco-Roman world and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology. And I think just over the centuries has learned to be patient. The notion, you know, the sort of Protestant millinarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense. The rise of the nation state, the fragmentation of the Western Church, it's always as much an effective history as a flight from history, whereas I think it fair to say that”
2023-07-12 · Conversations with Tyler · David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source