front cover of Contemplation and Kingdom
Contemplation and Kingdom
Kevin Hart
St. Augustine's Press, 2020
This book rises out of Dr. Kevin Hart’s 2020 Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas. Contemplation and Kingdom seeks to retrieve aspects of Richard of St. Victor's treatment of contemplation, principally in De arca mystica, and does so by weighing Thomas Aquinas's reservations about this treatment in the Summa theologiæ. Is Aquinas right to object, as Augustine does in De Doctrina Christiana, that our contemplation should go directly to God and not be stalled in the consideration of the natural world? What relation is there between Jesus's preaching of the Kingdom and the contemplation of God? Is the contemplative life consistent with Jesus's injunction to love both God and neighbor? These are the principal questions considered in the book.

This book is vintage Hart, erudite, well written, a treat for a wide readership. It is an example of how theology ought to be done, with a clarity and depth unsurpassed in today’s scholarly world. Its blend of anglo-saxon elegance and continental insights will be praised in the Academy and outside. – Jean-Yves Lacoste, Clare Hall, Cambridge
In the light of great contemporary interest in contemplation, this brilliant and erudite work is a stunning example. The focus on Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas is especially appropriate. Theologians and philosophers will be especially thankful for Kevin Hart’s work on the actuality of contemplation. – David Tracy, University of Chicago 

Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia where he is also Courtesy Professor of English and Courtesy Professor of French. In 2020 he was awarded the Aquinas Medal by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. His 2020 Étienne Gilson Lectures, given at L'Institut Catholique de Paris, offer a fresh approach to the theology of the imago dei in Augustine. His 2020 Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow University, examine various questions to do with the theology of contemplation and propose a new "hermeneutics of contemplation." His most recent scholarly publications include Kingdoms of God and Poetry and Revelation, and his most recent collections of poetry are Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Barefoot.
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The Dark Gaze
Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred
Kevin Hart
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Maurice Blanchot is among the most important twentieth-century French thinkers. Figures such as Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas all draw deeply on his novels and writings on literature and philosophy. In The Dark Gaze, Kevin Hart argues that Blanchot has given us the most persuasive account of what we must give up—whether it be continuity, selfhood, absolute truth, totality, or unity—if God is, indeed, dead. Looking at Blanchot’s oeuvre as a whole, Hart shows that this erstwhile atheist paradoxically had an abiding fascination with mystical experiences and the notion of the sacred.

The result is not a mere introduction to Blanchot but rather a profound reconsideration of how his work figures theologically in some of the major currents of twentieth-century thought. Hart reveals Blanchot to be a thinker devoted to the possibilities of a spiritual life; an atheist who knew both the Old and New Testaments, especially the Hebrew Bible; and a philosopher keenly interested in the relation between art and religion, the nature of mystical experience, the link between writing and the sacred, and the possibilities of leading an ethical life in the absence of God.
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Imagining Australia
Literature and Culture in the New New World
Judith Ryan
Harvard University Press

Beginning in the last third of the twentieth century, Australian literary and cultural studies underwent a profound transformation to become an important testing ground of new ideas and theories. How do Australian cultural products project a sense of the nation today? How do Australian writers, artists, and film directors imagine the Australian heritage and configure its place in a larger world that extends beyond Australia's shores?

Ranging from the country's colonial beginnings to its more globally oriented present, the nineteen essays by distinguished scholars working on the cutting edge of the field present a multi-faceted view of the vast land down under. A central theme is the relation of cultural products to nature and history. Issues explored include problems of race and gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, individual and national identity, subjective experience and international connections. Among others, the essays treat major authors such as Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Judith Wright.

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Lands of Likeness
For a Poetics of Contemplation
Kevin Hart
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An original and profound exploration of contemplation from philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart.
 
In Lands of Likeness, Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.
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