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David Bentley Hart s apocalyptic view of tradition

David Bentley Hart does not get out of bed in the morning to take on small projects. In his most recent volume (which is, as usual, mischievously polemical, dauntingly erudite, and verbose), he sets his sights on John Henry Newman’s conception of tradition as expressed in his landmark work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845, revised 1878), the publication of which precipitated the Victorian scholar’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism and arguably now serves as a major pillar of the Catholic Church’s self-understanding.