New essay published at the LA Review of Books: "Public Theology in Retreat"

I've got a new essay available over at the Los Angeles Review of Books called "Public Theology in Retreat." It's ostensibly a review essay of three books published by David Bentley Hart in the last year, but I use that occasion to ask about the role of public theology in contemporary U.S. intellectual culture, using Hart as a sort of Trojan horse. Alan Jacobs's essay in Harper's last year serves as a framing device, and I look at Hart as an exception that proves the rule—even while portraying Hart's thought to a largely non-theological audience as a kind of specimen, to intrigue and possibly attract unfamiliar and potentially hostile minds. We live in perilous and fickle times, after all. Why not give theology a try? There have been stranger bedfellows.

My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.