For those not already acquainted with him, David Bentley Hart of the University of Notre Dame is widely regarded as one of the two most influential academic theologians in the English-speaking world today (along with John Milbank of Nottingham University). Hart’s output is prodigious, and his range of intellectual interests—in the literature of various languages—is staggering. His published PhD dissertation, The Beauty of the Infinite (2004), caused reviewers to regard him, young as he was, as a leading Christian theologian.

Though Hart no longer has possession of his personal library of some 20,000 volumes, he seems to have read most of it and not to have forgotten much. Had he been born earlier, he’s the sort of scholar who might have sat beside C. S. Lewis, J. R. R.and contains some 3,500 footnotes. Douglas Farrow of McGill University suggests that those interested in universalism should read both books. I hope so.

Though Hart often wields the whip of intellectual controversy, I received no tongue-lashing during my time with him, but I was present when he took a younger Thomist philosopher at our university to the woodshed. I then became aware that notions of divine sovereignty—Thomistic or Calvinistic—are anathema to Hart. He sparred in a local pub with one of my own PhD advisees regarding the biblical command for the destruction of the Canaanites. My student interpreted these passages as referring to historical events, while Hart clearly did not; he understood the texts symbolically.

In spring 2015 I went off to teach at Birmingham University in England, while David