Leaves in the Wind - By David Bentley Hart

It has been some time since I lasted posted a video here. The past year and a half has been a physical challenge.

This is the record of what for me was an altogether delightful encounter. It was, I suppose, an interview, with me in the place of the interviewee. Bryn Morris is a reader of my works who lives in Sunshine Coast, Australia: A husband, father to a nine month old baby, a musician, and a friend of humpback whales and their young. He has taken assorted masters degrees in education and theology, even studying for a time under John Behr. He also studied geology at some juncture, being a lover of the sciences. And he writes a Substack publication of his own called A Leisurely Stroll.

The occasion of the conversation was that he thought I should have discussed my book Prisms, Veils in public a bit more than I have been able to do to this point, and offered to play the part of an interviewer on the topic. It was not hard to convince me, since the book is especially close to my heart. I expected a short conversation, but that was not to be, principally because Bryn turned out to be just about the most perceptive reader of the text I could have hoped for. In the course of the interview, we talked about any number of topics in the arts, philosophy, theology, the natural sciences, and so forth, all of which was rich and illuminating for me. More to the point, though, when Bryn questioned me directly about both the book as a whole and various of the stories in particular, his insights were to my mind extraordinarily penetrating. It made me think that the book actually succeeds at what I wanted it to do. I am extremely grateful to him.

One incidental note: At the end of the recording, the conversation turned to baseball (which is a game actually played by some Australians) and we paused to rhapsodize on the talents of Shohei Ohtani. As soon as the recording was finished, I went to watch the final NLCS game between LA and Milwaukee—a game in which Ohtani had possibly the single greatest performance on the field in the history of the sport. Six shut-out innings with ten strikeouts from the mound, his fastball reaching triple digits, his other pitches darting like dragonflies over a marsh, and three home runs at the plate. In fact, he started the first inning with three Ks in the top of the frame and then led off the bottom with the first of his homers. The second he hit left the stadium, so it is hard to say whether the estimate of 469 feet was accurate or not; it seemed to go that high before descending beyond the pavilions of Chavez Ravine. Anyway, what a remarkable moment of synchronicity. And can anyone doubt that Ohtani is not only the greatest baseball player of our time, but possibly the greatest there has ever been?

Episode #28 - A Conversation with My Brother (the other one)

Though my brother Robert is an Anglican rector down in the Research Triangle down in North Carolina, he was a musician will before he ever considered ordination. Our conversation here, consequently, is on matters strictly musical. You can see he dressed for the occasion. The exchange took an unexpected turn. We began by discussing aspects of the performer's art and some of his own compositions, then shifted to Chopin (who was supposed to be the principal topic), only to veer off onto an extended discussion of The Beatles.

#27 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 5 of 5

And, at last, the final chapter in the sprawling epic that was this year's Stanton Lectures. That infernal machine the "Owl" seems to me to have done an especially bad job of separating voices from the ambient sound in the lecture theatre, but that's what makes technological progress so exciting: it's as likely to make things worse as it is to make them better. In fact, the audio in the live recording is sufficiently bad in this case that I have recorded an alternative version, which I have used for this podcast here and over at the Substack page for Leaves in the Wind (https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com).

If one wants to follow the lecture easily, it might be better simply better to listen to this recording. If then wants to try to listen in to the final question and answer session of the lectures, one could start the original video at about the 47-minute mark and try to make out the exchanges recorded there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDYXOsEtURE.

In time, the lectures will be published, in considerably longer forms than the versions delivered live.

Episode #26 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 4 of 5

The penultimate chapter in this year's Stanton Lectures, again recorded--with questionable success--by the diabolical contraption known as the "Owl."

#25 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 3

This is the third of this year's Stanton Lectures, once again captured by that unpleasant little automaton the "Owl." How well that device dealt with the acoustics of the lecture theatre is something of an open question; much depended upon how it was placed on any given day.

#24 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology" - Lecture 2

Here is the second of this year's Stanton Lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge earlier this month. In this case, the lecture was recorded at the time of its public delivery. The device that captured the "performance" was something called an "Owl," a rather macabre little object that tracked movement and sound and then created a (to my mind) annoying composite image. I would have preferred a simple single-aspect camera, even one of relatively low resolution, as well as a dedicated microphone; but omnia mutantur and all that.

Since I have been asked by two friends, I should note that the object under the back panel of my jacket was an elastic padded brace for a muscle I pulled in my lower back. I was not smuggling contraband or concealing a phonograph (like the one Harpo uses to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business) or sporting an obi makuro. Honest.

It turns out that the audio recording of the first Stanton Lecture, captured on Catherine Pickstock's phone, was successfully made. It also does not include the questions that followed the lecture, but it does include Catherine's introduction to the series; and so I post it here for anyone who may wish to hear that.

Episode #22 - "The Light of Tabor" Lecture 1: "Notes Toward a Monistic Christology" by David Bentley Hart

This is the first of the Stanton Lectures that I delivered at the University of Cambridge at the end of April and through the first week and a half of May this year. It is not, however, a recording of the lecture as delivered on the first night of the series. Due to some errors of planning, which led to technical issues of an irresoluble nature, that recording was never made. The rest of the lectures were properly recorded, however, and will be posted in due time.

I apologize for my somewhat torpid performance here. In part, it is the result of having no one to react to whenever I turned my eyes up from the page, but in larger part it is because I am still in a very melancholy frame of mind.

Episode #21 - "Fields as Formal Causes"

[I am DBH’s temporary guest-editor while he and his family take time to themselves to continue to adjust to the loss of someone they love.]

This conversation was recorded on the evening of 10 May, at the London home of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his wife Jill Purce. Dr. Hart and his son (Patrick) were visiting for dinner, at which A. N. Wilson and his wife Ruth Guilding were allso guests; but, before everyone had gathered, there was time for Rupert Sheldrake and David Bentley Hart to slip upstairs to the study for this quick conversation.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, biochemist, parapsychologist, philosopher and historian of science. He secured his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge for his work on plant hormones and development.

Recently, Giulia Leo, a student at Columbia University's Graduate School for Journalism, conducted a short interview with me for an audio story to be broadcast on Columbia's own Uptown Radio (for information regarding which, one may go to uptownradio.org).

The topic of the piece is eclipses and it is directly related to the book "Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts", edited by Tom McLeish and Henrike Lange (to which I contributed an essay). More specifically, her story principally concerns Native American beliefs, practices, and traditions. I found it a delightful conversation. Her piece appeared today (28 March), and it incorporates some material from the interview; but here is the interview in its entirety.