The “Never Ending Poem”: Some Remarks on Dombrowski's Divine Beauty

Just about a decade ago, at the very beginning of what has proven now to be a staggeringly long midlife crisis, I wrote a little book about the religious significance of boredom. (I think of this as yin to the yang of more commonplace considerations of the religious significance of beauty.) That book concluded with a brief meditation on “waiting,” in which I distinguished between waiting for meaning and the more proactively creative exercise of waiting on meaning. Daniel Dombrowski’s splendid book on Charles Hartshorne’s aesthetics is of the latter sort, a real service to meaning, both a careful attentiveness to meaning as it is embodied in Hartshorne’s writing and the insightful extension of the latter’s ..