With the publication of A Roland Colonnade, the written accounts of the meeting of minds between David Bentley Hart and his dog Roland come full circle. One likes to think that Roland would have appreciated the image. So this is not a sequel, but rather a companion, to Roland in Moonlight. As noted in the Introduction, the purpose of this volume is to assemble, in their original states, all the individual columns featuring Roland, for the sake of a complete record of that mighty soul’s literary posterity; and also as a tribute to one who was loved dearly by his family, and by so many others—seemingly from afar and yet more truly in immediacy. For many readers, A Roland Colonnade offers a chance to revisit that ineffable warmth and solace. And as the author concludes the book, “But the new sky and the new earth are still promised, and all our memories of Roland tell us why they are still worth hoping for and believing in. Somewhere, we have to believe, he is waiting for us.”
Praise
“If Plato or Plotinus had lived with a dog—a dog that could talk Greek, that is—the History of Philosophy might have been even more interesting than it is. Luckily, David Bentley Hart had his dialogues with Roland, in the most lucid of English, and we are all the richer for them—just as we all share in his grief for the vanished canine philosopher. These dialogues are as rich, humane, funny, and stimulating as when we first met Roland in Moonlight.” —A.N. WILSON, author of Goethe: His Faustian Life and Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy
“There is a terrible philosophical timidity, typical of modernity, that refuses to accept that the mind and the cosmos are instinct with life from top to bottom, that our very ability to ask ourselves whether we are ‘really’ conscious and free is evidence that we are these things. No contemporary writer has done more to lay out the arguments against these life-denying reductionisms than David Bentley Hart. A similar timidity—a similar refusal to believe in any fact, however obvious, if it happens to be beautiful—may keep some readers from admitting to themselves that this book and its companion volume, Roland in Moonlight, are as good as they actually are: a spectacular recovery of the ancient art of the philosophical dialogue. Such readers only punish themselves. The Roland books are not only wonderfully enjoyable, and deeply poignant: they are major works by a major author, or, what is better, by a major canine intellectual and his human collaborator.” —PHILIP CHRISTMAN, author of How to be Normal and Why Christians Should Be Leftists
About the Author
David Bentley Hart writes on a great many topics in a variety of genres, producing works of philosophy, fiction, religious studies, theology, cultural commentary, literary criticism, treatments of the arts and sciences, and the occasional screed. His most recent books are All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale) and Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables (Notre Dame).
Roland 婺 Hart was a dog, a polymath, and in all likelihood a saint or bodhisattva, who was boundlessly generous in imparting his wisdom in those most in need of it, and whose presence was always a source of unalloyed joy for those who loved him.
