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.
