also considers biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and historical theology (with extensive references to universalist ideas among Christian patristic figures such as Gregory of Nyssa). Hart, with his characteristic rhetorical provocations, uses terms such as "infernalists" to describe his opponents. This grounding in Christian metaphysics, insistence on universalism being the only true articulation of the Christian gospel, and use of combative rhetoric all combine to make Hart's case for universalism more uncompromising than most previous Christian arguments, and this has led to the use of the term "hard universalism" to describe Hart's position. (See this article's section on "Criticism and heterodoxy questions" for some more information on this topic.) Atemporal fall Hart refers to the idea of an atemporal fall in his 2005 book The Doors of the Sea as well as in his essay "The Devil’s March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations" (from his 2020 book Theological Territories): The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. ...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender. Personal life Hart is married and has one grown son with whom he co-wrote the children's book The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla. He has two brothers: Addison Hodges Hart (also an author) and Fr. Robert Hart (rector of Saint Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, NC). At the age of 18, Hart moved from high-church Anglicanism to join the Orthodox tradition and is asked to serve and contribute by leaders in the Orthodox worldwide such as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. During a September 16, 2022