Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama By Jerry L. Walls 219 pp. Brazos Press. $19.99 Written theology, in my own experience with the faith, serves…

Why Can’t Grad School Be Purgatorial? No, good reader, that would be too easy.  Graduate school itself wasn’t much at all like Purgatory.  After all, the conditions for my leaving…

To get the first question out of the way, yes, I’ve been calling the last Cantos of Purgatory the Dante Apocalypse for several years now, and my term predates the…

Rather than write a giant post about the last nine Cantos, I’m going to attempt two short ones, the last dealing mainly with Dante’s apocalypse.  If, as I plan, I…

It’s fitting that my Dante posts stalled out right when it was time to write about sloth, no? Good Desire and Bad Desire In Canto 18 Virgil continues his explanation…

The Architecture of Purgatory This section of Cantos begins to reveal connections between the terraces, both in terms of the media through which the tragic and exemplary stories come to…

Finally entering Purgatory, our pilgrim gets into some of the coolest parts of the poem, those passages that start to form both a theology of desire and a theological account…

Because I’ve not written about Dante in a couple summers (in 2011 I was wrapping up the dissertation, and in 2012 I was wrapping up Emmanuel’s QEP), I wanted to…

Series Index for 2015 Dante Read-Through Dante 2010: Inferno Dante 2009: Paradiso Dante 2009: Purgatorio Dante 2009: Inferno Dante 2008: Paradiso Dante 2008: Purgatorio Dante 2008: Inferno Being a bit of…

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about…