Leaves in the Wind - By David Bentley Hart

Where this show ranks

About this podcast

"Leaves in the Wind" Hosted by David Bentley Hart, PhD. Leaves in the Wind is devoted to all the things I have been discussing for years—World Literature; Religion, East and West; Philosophy (with a current emphasis on philosophy of mind); Theology; Metaphysics; Culture; Music; The Visual, Plastic, and Dramatic Arts, including Cinema; Baseball, including an obsessive veneration of Frank Robinson; Asian Arts, Languages, Literatures, Philosophies, and Religions; Japanese Aesthetics; Why Frank Robinson was the greatest player in the history of the game; Political Theory; Romanticism; Crab Cakes; Why there should be a national monument to Frank Robinson; The Sciences; Obscure Books; Philosophical Idealism; and so on. As ever, I write in various forms—essays, short stories, long disquisitions, dramatic dialogues, poems, satires, conversations with Roland, or whatever else takes my fancy. I make every effort to be as diverting as possible without becoming merely facetious, and as reflective as possible without becoming merely ponderous. New material appears more or less weekly. One regular feature is devoted to great but largely unknown works of literature. This follows from an article of mine that has proved more popular than I could have anticipated, “Books from a Vanished Library,” which also served as the introduction to my collection The Dream-Child’s Progress . One recurring feature are Q&A posts in which I attempt to answer questions that have come my way from subscribers, either on a particular post or on some topic that I have addressed elsewhere in my work. I even occasionally try to answer questions on topics I have never addressed before at all, if I can think of something sufficiently insightful, witty, or flippant to say. Now this podcast here, is added to the mix. I can promise that it will be entertaining. I can even promise that it might occasionally—just for mischief’s sake—be profound. Subscribers enjoy full access to the newsletter and website , and they never miss an update. Every new posting on the newsletter goes directly to their inbox. The rate at present is based on a very dubious set of calculations regarding likely subscriber numbers, fees, taxes, and time expended in maintaining the newsletter. There are monthly subscriptions as well as yearly, the latter adding up to less than the former over the course of twelve months; there is in addition a special category for “Founding Subscribers” set at a higher rate, for those who out of the sheer goodness of their hearts might want to help keep the whole enterprise running; that subscription comes with the right to give two free six-month subscriptions to the newsletter as gifts to friends, priority in my Q&A posts, and (of course) my profound gratitude. To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com . (Rising from his humble beginnings—laboring in obscurity at a manual typewriter, nourished entirely on the blue crabs and oysters he was able to gather up along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay each morning, then forced to live a peripatetic life wandering Cambridge to Cambridge—David Bentley Hart eventually insinuated himself into the company of influential men and women and then, by their good offices, into print. He now lives in a savage region where Maryland crab cakes have to be delivered by overnight air delivery. His last remaining ambition is to visit Kyoto before he dies.)