
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays
About this book
Incisive essays from a master wordsmith
Why has Don Juan become so passé of late? What’s the trouble with Ayn Rand? How did the Doge of Venice come to venerate the counterfeit remains of Siddhartha Gautama? Why does the Bentley family’s collection of ancestral relics include a bronzed human thumb? And what, exactly, is the story behind Great Uncle Aloysius, who was born a Quaker but died a pagan?
This collection of occasional essays brings us David Bentley Hart at his finest: startlingly clear and deliciously abstruse, coolly wise and burningly witty, fresh and timeless, mystical and concrete — often all at once. Hart’s incisive blend of philosophy, moral theology, and cultural criticism, together with his flair for both the well-told story and the well-turned phrase, is sure to delight.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Preface
- 1. The Gnostic Turn
- 2. On Butterflies and Being
- 3. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (and Christ)
- 4. Saint Shakyamuni
- 5. The Secret Commonwealth
- 6. The Poetry of Autumn
- 7. Imprisoned
- 8. The Sanest of Men
- 9. A Perfect Game
- 10. Julian Our Contemporary
- 11. Eschatology as Entertainment
- 12. . . . Of Hills, Brooks, Standing Lakes, and Groves . . .
- 13. Brilliant Specialists
- 14. Anarcho--Monarchism
- 15. The Abbot and Aunt Susie
- 16. A Forgotten Poet
- 17. An Infinite Passion
- 18. A Philosopher in the Twilight
- 19. The Power of the Sword
- 20. The Trouble with Ayn Rand
- 21. Great--Uncle Aloysius
- 22. Seven Characters in Search of a Nihil Obstat
- 23. A Splendid Wickedness
- 24. Aloysius Bentley’s “Melancholy”
- 25. Graysteil
- 26. Lupinity, Felinity, and the Limits of Method
- 27. America and the Angels of Sacré--Coeur
- 28. Mediocrity’s Tribute
- 29. The Priceless Steven Pinker
- 30. Death the Stranger
- 31. Through a Gloss, Darkly
- 32. God and the Mad Hatter
- 33. Jung’s Therapeutic Gnosticism
- 34. Seeing the God
- 35. Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws
- 36. Si Fueris Romae
- 37. Nature Loves to Hide
- 38. Purpose and Function
- 39. No Enduring City
- 40. The True Helen
- 41. Dante Decluttered
- 42. Emergence and Formation
- 43. From a Lost World
- 44. A Phantom’s Visit (C.B.)
- 45. Nabokov’s Supernatural Secret
- 46. Roland on Consciousness
- 47. The Love of Wisdom
- 48. Gods and Gopniks
- 49. Roland in Moonlight
- 50. Ad Litteram
- 51. Roland on Free Will
- Coda: C.B.