Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia Unexpected Company There’s a certain mindset among progressive-minded folks that one or two significant points of difference, especially on moral questions, means that…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia Analogy and Allegory More than in the first two Canticles, Dante spends a great share of his lines in Paradiso telling us, the…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia When Knowledge Passes Away Virgil’s long explanation of the genesis of souls and bodies poses a particular sort of intellectual challenge: this version…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia The Speech of the Saved I’ve taught Dante’s Purgatorio to three cohorts of upper-division literature students, and each time, the students do alright…

“Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” With this proverb, the ancient Hebrew sages defined the value of friendship. Similarly, the Stoic Marcus Aurelius began his Meditations enumerating the…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia Worthy of the Kingdom Dante couldn’t care less about my evangelical sensibility and sensitivities, and I love him for that. Even beyond the…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia Hypocrites and Church-Thieves Living seven hundred years after Dante’s poetic career makes the final stretch of Inferno a particular philosophical challenge, largely because…

Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia The Democratization of American Sins One popular topic for invention among youth-group kids in the mid-nineties (and I was one for a spell)…

There are winners and losers every time intellectual capital changes hands. But the upside of that process is that there are always figures from the past who are ready to…

Series Index It’s been a few years since I wrote reflections on my summer reading on Dante, and back then I used to do three posts each summer, one on…

The Christian Humanists respond to listener emails. [0:00] An announcement from David Grubbs! [5:05] Why Christian Existentialism? [9:12] Kierkegaard and Christendom [17:41] John McAdams and academic freedom [27:09] More holy…

In its historical particularity tragedy had its first great moment in ancient Athens, when didaskaloi, educators, would compete for civic recognition staging increasingly elaborate exchanges of dramatic speeches.  And once…

What does it mean to have a good death? Many in our time use technology in an attempt to stave off aging or dying, or to conceal the effects of…

There’s often a mutual uneasiness between environmentalists and Christians, especially evangelical Christians, as if believing the Apostle’s Creed means that you aren’t able to care about the condition of the…

In the early fourteenth century one of the true figures of Christian intellectual genius gave us the Commedia, a pilgrim’s allegorical journey through Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso for the…