David Ananda Hart

Career

Educated at Keble College, Oxford and Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, with a doctorate in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Derby, Hart is a prominent member of a group of non-realist theologians inspired by the work of Don Cupitt. In the 1990s Hart worked as a chaplin at Loughborough University in the midlands. In 2006 Hart was the subject of some controversy after newspapers in India and the UK reported that he had converted to Hinduism, changing his middle name from Alan to Ananda, but without renouncing Christianity or his priestly orders. Hart is currently India Secretary of the World Congress of Faiths. He is also a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar (USA) and Samvada (India). His next book 'An Introduction to Hinduism' (London: Continuum 2009; Series Editor: Clinton Bennett) will examine the breadth of the Hindu faith as he discovers it living in India and will show how he regards his position as a Hindu believer as entirely compatible with being an Anglican priest in good standing with his diocesan bishop back in England.

In September 2014 David Ananda returned to his home in South India to take up a position as Consultant and Teacher for the Venad Education and Social Services, a registered NGO in India providing educational opportunities for the children of the marginalised Christian fishing communities in five centres in Kerala and one in Sri Lanka. He is also finalising his eighth book 'Study in Hinduism' which is due out early in 2015.

As an immediate response to the current critical situation in the Levant with ten 'coalition' forces mustered to bomb the Islamic State, David Ananda has joined authorial forces with Mar Aprem Metropolitan of the Church of the East whose Patriarch is in Baghdad. Mar Aprem who dwells in Trichur Kerala is the senior most living Chaldean-Syrian (Church of the East) bishop and has visited Mosul and other Nestorian Churches now under severe threat by Islamic State in Northern Iraq. He is, like David Ananda, a Master of Sacred Theology at Union Theological Seminary New York, and holds a Doctorate in Theology from United Theological College Bangalore. The book will be published in London and India before Christmas, and will be entitled 'The Wide Gulf in the Gulf'. It will introduce the religious routes of the current war, with chapters on who are Sunnis, Shi'ites, Sufis, Druze, Maronites, Jezedis, Nestorian Christians, Syrian Catholics, Jacobites and other religious minorities in the Levant. The Preface (yet to be confirmed) will be by Shashi Tharoor MP for Thiruvananthapuram, onetime United Nations representative in New York for India and recently Foreign Minister under the previous Congress Party Government from 2009-2014.

On 29 April 2015, in the cause of contributing to the greater peace and harmony of the world as an individual believer, Fr David Ananda took a further step that had been nurtured over many months after his trip to the World Sufi Conference in Algeria in October 2014, and went to the Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby, where he had from 1998 - 2005 been Actine Anglican Chaplain,Religious and Pastoral Services Development Co-Ordinator, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, and first Director- Designate of the Centre, with fundraiser Robertt Astick and with Raj Bali MBE helping to raise the funds for the Centre's opening in 2004 by the Duke of Gloucester, and after a discussion of his intention with Father Daniel the Russian Orthodox Chaplain, with whom he had served as a pastor over the first decade of the 21st century, and the current Methodist (Malaysian) and Anglican Chaplains (whom he met for the first time that day), and with no objection and very understanding being given by these colleagues, he attended the evening prayer with Imam Abdullah and was with due formality after appropriate ablutions and recitation of 'There is only one GOD and Mohammed is his prophet' was ereceived as a Muslim into the Ummah at 5pm. He is now working jointly with the Parish Church of St Anne's Palagatura and the Supreme Mosque of Negombo Beach to provide spiritual and educational support for the children of the fisherfolk in and around the Indian Ocean, supported by the NGO the International Relief Federation (registered in London) and working as a partner organisation with Venad Education and Social Service (VESS) Kerala State India to build a sixth school for teaching both primary school children and IELTS English language for those in their late teens and early twenties. The charity intends to bring native English speakers from the UK, USA and elsewhere to help him teach in a specially dedicated abode called Our Lady of the Sea Fisherfolk Foundation.

Publications

"The Wide Gulf in the Gulf: the Religious Origins of the War in the Levant" (co-authored with His Grace Mar Aprem, Head of Church of the East (Om Books 2015 forthcoming)