From the prolific, profound pen of David Bentley Hart comes this collection of essays, reviews, and columns published in popular journals and newspapers over the past few years, comprising observations on culture, religion, and society at large. In the Aftermath fully displays the virtuosic prose that readers have come to expect from Hart.

-Here I want -- at least in part -- to entertain. This is not to say that the pieces gathered here are not serious in their arguments; quite the contrary. . . . I mean only that, in these articles, I have given my natural inclinations...

As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God's power or God's nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God -- if such exists -- allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering. He calls both to recognize in the worst catastrophes not the providential will of God but rather the ongoing struggle...

Brilliant scholar and wordsmith David Bentley Hart turns his mind and imagination to narrative fiction in this volume, The Devil and Pierre Gernet, a thought-provoking collection of four short stories and one novella. Anticipating questions about his shift in genre, Hart writes that -God is no more likely (and probably a good deal less likely) to be found in theology than in poetry and fiction.-
These stories -- -The Devil and Pierre Gernet, - -The House of Apollo, - -A Voice from the Emerald World, - -The Ivory Gate, - and -The Other- -- beguile and entrance the reader through...

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...

"Incisive essays from a master wordsmith"
Why has Don Juan become so passe 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...

Rowan Williams says that David Bentley Hart -can always be relied on to offer a perspective on the Christian faith that is both profound and unexpected.- The Hidden and the Manifest, a new collection of this brilliant scholar's work, contains twenty essays by Hart on theology and metaphysics.

Spanning Hart's career both topically and over time, these essays cover such subjects as the Orthodox understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice; the metaphysics of Paradise Lost; Christianity, modernity, and freedom; death, final judgment, and the meaning of life; and many more.