David Bentley Hart is, perhaps, the most stimulating (and, at times, disconcerting) Orthodox theologian writing in America today. His most recent book, Atheist Delusions, was appreciatively reviewed in Commonweal (May 8, 2009) by William Portier.A recent post on the First Things blog has Hart passing seamlessly from Darwin to Saint-Exupry to the Matrix trilogy.Here is where he winds up:

My final observation, I suppose, would be this: Our longing for transcendence is inextinguishable in us, and the appeal of the transcendent to our deepest natures will always be audible and visible to us in some formfirst and finally in the form of beautyand will continue to waken in us both wonder and an often inexpressible unhappiness. But in an age such as ours, within the picture of the world that now prevails, that beauty must seem more ambiguous, more beleaguered, and the call of transcendence more elusive of interpretation, like a voice heard in a dream.In the absence of that scale of shining mediations that once seemed seamlessly to unite the immanent and the transcendent, the earthly and the heavenly, nature and supernature, we are nevertheless still open to the same summons issued in every age to every soul; but it must for now come to us as something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was.

"Ambiguous, beleaguered, elusive?" Is this indeed the context in which we find ourselves? And is there non-gnostic recourse and remedy?