Atheist Delusions

David Bentley Hart has written an interesting book titled, “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies”; following are a product description and editorial reviews.



Here is the “Product Description” from Amazon.com:

Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance:
So contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheist’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history.

Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

Here is their “Editorial Reviews”:

“With impressive erudition and polemical panache, David Hart smites hip and thigh the peddlers of a ‘new atheism’ that recycles hoary arguments from the past. His grim assessment of our cultural moment challenges the hope that ‘the Christian revolution’ could happen again.”
-Richard John Neuhaus, former editor in chief of First Things

“Provoked by and responding to the standard-bearers of ‘the New Atheism’, this original and intellectually impressive work deftly demolishes their mythical account of ‘the rise of modernity.’ Hart argues instead that the genuinely humane values of modernity have their historic roots in Christianity.”
-Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke Divinity School

“In this learned, provocative, and sophisticated book, Hart presents a frontal challenge to today’s myopic caricature of the culture and religion that existed in previous centuries.”
-Robert Louis Wilken, University of Virginia

“Surely Dawkins, Hitchens et al would never have dared put pen to paper had they known of the existence of David Bentley Hart. After this demolition-job all that is left for them to do is repent and rejoice at the discreditation of their erstwhile selves.”
-John Milbank, author of Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology

“A devastating dissection of the ‘new atheism,’ a timely reminder of the fact that ‘no Christianity’ would have meant ‘no West,’ and a rousing good read. David Hart is one of America’s sharpest minds, and this is Hart in full, all guns firing and the band playing on the deck.”
-George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington