Gabriel Said Reynolds— Heaven and hell are important notions to the Qur’an, the scripture of Islam. The divine voice of the Qur’an assures its audience that those who are faithful and do good will enter into paradise, which it names janna (related to Hebrew gan, meaning “garden”) and firdaws (from
David Bentley Hart— There is, it seems, a very strict etiquette of hell. I don’t mean the manners and mores proper to the establishment itself; I expect those are pretty dreadful, if you’re the fastidious sort. Rather, I mean a set of unwritten rules one is supposed to observe when
David Bentley Hart— When I came to the task of producing my own translation of the New Testament, I knew that there are certain words and phrases in the text that present special difficulties, and that no solution I chose would please everybody. In some cases, the difficulty lies in
By his own estimation David Bentley Hart has written “either an extremely ambitious or extremely unambitious book,” though he tends toward latter. In The Experience of God, Hart sets out to write something akin to a definition of God, so indeed the concept is vast. Still, Hart tackles it with