Bernard Schweizer

Who is Bernard Schweizer?

Bernard Schweizer is a professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literatures. He is a leading Rebecca West scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of Rebecca West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and is currently the second president of the Society. Schweizer has written pioneering scholarly works in three fields: the politics of travel literature, the female epic, and, most recently, the treatment of God-hatred in literature.

His latest book, Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, explores an almost unknown strain of God-thinking. Misotheists are not atheists, as Schweizer demonstrates, but people who blaspheme because they cannot forgive God for the miseries-both personal and collective-that befall humanity. Far from being depraved or immoral individuals, the misotheists treated by Schweizer are great humanists, thinkers, and artists.

Schweizer grew up in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, where he lived for the first 28 years of his life.