An Announcement and a Link
to a somewhat world-weary interview
For those still interested in the issues raised in my book That All Shall Be Saved, and perhaps in the recent audaciously dogged attacks on the book waged by one James Dominic Rooney OP, I offer this link to an interview I had with David Artman on his podcast “Grace Saves All.” I was reluctant to engage the dapper little Dominican, but the host persuaded me with his surfeit of southern charm.
There is a touch of asperity in the interview, of which I am neither proud nor ashamed, but about which I shall wax apologetic in the most strictly technical sense: that is, I shall explain myself. For one thing, after three years or so of dealing with the same bad arguments from various quarters, I feel I may plead temperamental fatigue. I know Rooney—in fact, amusingly enough, it was an especially dreary lunchtime conversation with him and Michael McClymond in St Louis back in 2014 that first made me resolve to write the book that became TASBS—so I should say that I believe he is sincere enough. But the quality of his arguments are (to put it mildly) a bit on the sub-standard side; and it is clear he has not mastered the content of the claims my book advances in the slightest. All of which is pardonable, I suppose. But, in the course of this recent affray, his first, intermediate, and final strategy at every point has been to scream “heresy” (in, if my memory of his voice is accurate, a kind of adolescent adenoidal vibrato). This is a rhetorical tactic that is always a sign of a certain arrested intellectual and emotional development. And that, I confess, annoyed me. More perhaps than it should have done, but there you have it.
The recent cold weather has done my pulmonary inflammatory condition no favors, so my voice is a bit rough in this recording. To me, this seems to lend an attractive air of world-weariness to the interview that I had not intended, but that I now recognize as wholly appropriate.
Ad memoriam eorum per saecula a Dominicanis interfectorum.
Apologies in advance that this comment isn't more substantive for a first time comment, but, Dr. Hart, I've been spending time with your work for several years now and I just wanted to express how meaningful your thought has been to me. I am currently attempting to pursue a vocation in ministry as a healthcare chaplain and when I think about encounter with so many in distress and deep pain, these questions become so profoundly, humanly urgent. The universalist answer has become core to my faith and I can't but envision it as absolutely integral to approaching with due gravity the work of, as they say, a ministry of presence and of clarifying the nature of God one should seek to emulate in that work. On a purely personal level, your work has been central to my finding real rest, really for the first time, in God's love and been a site of deep healing. So, despite how understandably wearying these responses to Rooney have been, I wanted to offer my thanks for your recapitulation of them here, as they continue to help me find a theological way forward into a real hope and a way into encountering the tradition that actually makes sense, both intellectually and morally. Sending all good wishes.
Increasingly I find that those upon whom the church sets the attack dogs, have something helpful to say. Usually it’s something ‘hiding in plain sight’ which it suits deeper darker agendas to distract the faithful from, for example the surfeit of texts suggesting ‘That All May Be Saved’. Surely the well ordered heart must desire this to be so, if only for purely selfish motives. Thank you for becoming a lightening rod David, however wearying.