David Bentley Hart - The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

David Bentley Hart, author of "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss," spoke on his book on Tuesday, March 25 at the Bonhoeffer House at the University of Virginia. Dr. Hart's lecture was sponsored by the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia (http://livedtheology.org). David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator. From the publisher: 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.