Pentecost reverses Babel. Whereas once language divided humanity, the words of the Apostles, spoken in the Spirit, unite humanity. Peter’s speech in Acts 2 causes people to repent, and the newly repentant form a new community where they share with each other and praise God. In other words, Peter
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Choosing a favorite canto in the Commedia is an impossible task. I can say, though, that Canto 23 in the Paradiso always takes my breath away. It’s appropriate that a canto devoted to the beauty of Beatrice and the flames’ love for Mary reaches such poetic heights. Here Dante sees Beatrice as
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Genealogy plays an important role in the Commedia. We spent a good amount of time discussing how Dante has chosen his poetic fathers. His relationships with Virgil and Statius are central to the narratives of the Inferno and the Purgatorio. And some of the most interesting moments in those poems
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“Heaven is won-der-ful, isn’t it?” That was the answer one of my students gave when we began our class discussion of the Paradiso a couple of years ago. Thinking about what heaven is like turns out to be a more difficult exercise than you might have expected. My students expect people in
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Today is the 200th birthday of the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Kieregaard is famous for many things: being a forerunner of existentialism, his concept of the “leap of faith” (a term he never actually uses), and his attacks on what he saw as the lazy Christianity of his day, which was
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[For part two of our discussion of the Purgatorio, see here. For part one of our discussion see here, with links to discussion of the Inferno.]
When Dante reaches the Garden of Eden in Canto 28, the as-yet-unnamed Matelda describes the two rivers Dante finds there:
On this side it descends and
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[For part one of our discussion of the Purgatorio see here, with links to discussion of the Inferno.]
Now that we have reached the middle of the Purgatorio and, therefore, the middle of the Commedia as a whole, I can’t help but marvel – again – at how miraculous this poem is. It would be
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[For links to our discussion of the Inferno see here.]
This weekend has been crazier than I thought it would be. Even though I’m up to date with the reading, I haven’t had time to put together a post on the beginning of the Purgatorio. I wanted to write about Cato, Virgil, and Sordello, and
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[For Part 4, see here. For Part 3, see here. For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. ]
I had hoped that I could tie things together in this post. I wanted to bring together some thoughts on Dante’s debt to Virgil both as a poet and a guide, on Dante’s
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[For Part 3, see here. For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. I want to make this post specific to one passage in these cantos because it will enable people to comment even if they have not gotten through the Canto 28. On Wednesday, I’ll post again on Cantos
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[For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. Please feel free to comment and join our discussion.]
This is only my third post on the Commedia, but already a little community has formed in the comments. (Of course, I encourage more people to share their thoughts!)
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[For Part 1, see here. For the introduction to our discussion, see here.]
In a recent post on dotCommonweal, Robert Imbelli discussed Charles Taylor’s term “excarnation,” which Imbelli glosses as “the avoidance or denial of those dimensions of humanity that threaten our sense of being
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It’s always worth thinking about context and expectation when we encounter books, especially books that our culture has deemed “important” or “great.” Reading Dostoevsky is something very different from reading a recipe. But I think reading Dante is more challenging even than Dostoevsky,
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It’s better in Greek. Isn’t it always?*
In English, we have the adjective “bittersweet.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word can be both a noun and an adjective, although it is primarily used as an adjective to mean, “Sweet with an admixture or aftertaste of bitterness
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I would hate to sound like Pauline Kael on Nixon or Peggy Noonan on Obama, but could someone please tell me: who loves Lena Dunham’s much-discussed HBO show Girls? Or maybe someone could tell me if he or she thinks Girls is worthy of all the hype it has received. I’d settle for anyone who
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Then Herod, when he saw that the had been tricked by the Wise Men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men. Thus was fulfilled what was
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John Connelly, the sage of Regis High School in New York City, once told a class of 30 sixteen year-olds, “Gentlemen, the culture wars are over. We lost.” The class’s discussion was emphatically not about any number of “hot button” social or political issues of the day. In fact, the
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The most recent Commonweal features an article by Professor Joseph Amar about the fate of Syrian Christians in the current violence in that country. In a short space, Amar discusses the political situation of contemporary Syria and the relationship between the Syriac churches and the West. Amar
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When I was studying in England, one of my teachers asked me if I was “one of those American intellectuals who loves baseball.” American? Absolutely. Intellectual? Hardly. Loves baseball? Well, that’s complicated. You see, I’m a Mets fan, and so loving baseball means loving the Mets, which
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My friend Cathy Kaveny has a few posts up on dotCommonweal about obstacles to evangelization. Christ blames the Pharisees for not understanding the signs of the times (Matthew 16:2-3), and Cathy is right to ask her readers to be sensitive to what might prevent people from embracing the Gospel
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In honor of Bloomsday, here are three of my favorite paragraphs from "Nausicaa," one of my favorite episodes:
THE SUMMER EVENING HAD BEGUN TO FOLD THE WORLD IN ITS mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly
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[Please read Edward Wheeler’s fine reflection before you read this.]
Two thoughts on democracy and community. First, GK Chesterton says somewhere that tradition in the democracy of the dead. Second, the rap group De La Soul rightly proclaims, “Neighborhoods become ’hoods when people ain’
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Higher education is much in the news these days. The New Yorker has an article about Stanford’s relationship with Silicon Valley. Frank Bruni worries about philosophy majors finding jobs, and Charles Morris worries that college is becoming a luxury item. In the latest Commonweal, Denis O’Brien
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Sometimes things are hidden in plain sight. I haven’t blogged for a few weeks because the books I’ve been reading have either been disappointing (Stephen Greenblatt’s Swerve), endless (Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: a Biography, which is superb, but I’m barely half way through it),
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John Jeremiah Sullivan inhabits Paul Lakeland’s “space between.” One of the joys of Verdicts is that I get book recommendations and I get help thinking through the books I’ve read. Because of the recommendation of Anthony Domestico (and James Woods) I recently read Pulphead, Sullivan’s
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“A ‘canon’ so established in practice serves not so much to enshrine a hundred books as to help students to develop their own standards of evaluation. The canon (if such it be) and the questioning of it go together. There must be questioning, and there must be something of value that has
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The final week of the year is a still week. The calendar counts down the days of December, and although there is always work to be done, people might be able to enjoy a day or two of recreation.
The Prophet Elijah learned that God speaks not in a heavy wind nor in an earthquake nor in a fire,
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It’s easy enough to enjoy a novel whose characters you love. While you read you can find yourself rooting for them, and after you finish the novel you might wish there was a sequel so that you could meet them again. The novel makes its own world, and you happily inhabit that world for a few days
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I tend to enjoy novels that depict students in college or recent college graduates. So some of my favorite fiction that I’ve read in the last ten years or so includes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and Tom Wolfe
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Sometime around 1993 (I remember it was my first year of high school), the singer Joan Osborne had a hit song “One of Us.” At one point in the song, Osborne sang
If god had a face,
What would it look like,
And would you want to see,
If seeing meant that you would have to
Believe in things
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One of my fondest memories of college is sitting in Greek 401, poring over Homer’s Iliad. We would each take turns translating the text, and then the whole class would discuss what had just been translated. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my friend translating the following exchange between
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All philosophy begins in wonder, Socrates tells us, and it is a mark of the greatest forms of human enquiry – from Homer to Heisenberg – that they increase our sense of wonder at the universe (or multiverse, if you must) and our place in it. The highest goal for teaching and commentary is to
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The great twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that Augustine’s Confessions is “possibly the most serious book ever written.” The operative word, of course, is “possibly,” but I have to say I’m inclined to agree. I have been reading the Confessions regularly since
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This weekend, July 15-16, Venice, Italy will celebrate its annual feast of the Redentore (the Redeemer) with fireworks, gondola races, concerts, and a public procession over a pontoon bridge built from one section of the city to another. From 1575-1577, Venice suffered from a plague that killed
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My friend Robert Imbelli posted Garry Wills's NYRB review of Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus's All Things Shining on the main Commonweal blog a few weeks ago. [Here's Commonweal's review--subscribers only.] While I generally agree with the thrust of Wills's review, the publication of David Foster
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