Tag Archives: dante

Aquinas and Dante On Homosexuality

Louis Crompton. Homosexuality and History (Harvard 2003), by Louis Crompton, is by far the best general history of homosexuality yet written, and in his chapter on the medieval world, he has a fascinating discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s and Dante’s treatment of … Continue reading

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Censorship Watch: For Sake of Mohammad, Valentina Sereni Seeks Ban on Dante, Gustav Dore, William Blake, and Botticelli

I feel personally broadsided. As someone who assigns Dante’s Divine Comedy (in Allen Mandelbaum’s great translation) to college students at least once every year-and-a-half or so, the following news headline, from London’s Telegraph, is disconcerting (to say the least): Dante’s Divine Comedy … Continue reading

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The Heart of Dante Alighieri

If you’ve never read Dante Alighieri, the following is written as an enticement for you to consider doing so. A Key Dante Biographical Data Point Dante was born in Florence in 1265, but he did not die there. In fact, … Continue reading

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Josh Timonen: Richard Dawkins’s Judas Iscariot?

Josh Timonen has been Richard Dawkins’s right hand man for a couple of years now, running the Richard Dawkins Foundation (RDF) store and managing the famous scientist’s website. As recently as February of 2010, Richard Dawkins was adamantly defending Timonen against a … Continue reading

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Is Atheist Morality an Oxymoron? Philosopher Joel Marks Gives Up on Right and Wrong

I find philosopher Joel Marks’s recent flat-out rejection of morality disarming in its honesty. Here’s Joel Marks: The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must … Continue reading

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Joel Marks’s Desirism vs. John Hart’s Commanderism

Atheist philosopher, and former Kantian, Joel Marks has given up on grounding morality absent God. So what now? Here’s Joel Marks’s default idea: base your choices—perhaps compassion today, perhaps hedonism tomorrow—on desire. He calls his position desirism. At the Catholic First Things … Continue reading

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Carl Jung, Alien Longing, Dante’s Beatrice—and Sarah Palin?

In a recent Washington Post review of a couple of UFO books that have just come out, there’s a sentence that I think nicely summarizes Carl Jung’s thesis on UFOs: [P]sychologist Carl Jung proposed that UFOs symbolized a wish that … Continue reading

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Why, if you’re a humanist, Renaissance art is important to contemplate

Stefano Zuffi, in his new book How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting  (Abrams 2010), explains: Wheras artists in the Middle Ages were not consciously ‘medieval’, artists in Italy between 1400 and 1600 very deliberately worked to bring about renewal. . . . … Continue reading

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“I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again”: A Woman’s Memory—and Dante’s “Inferno”

In Dante’s Inferno, the people in hell often seem to be experiencing recursive loops of suffering, forever reenacting—and recalling—the bad feelings that drove them to compulsively sin. So it is, in the Inferno, that the adulterous couple Paolo and Francesca … Continue reading

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Our Monsters, Ourselves

The MONSTEROUS plays an enormous role in literature and the human imagination—from the Book of Revelation and Dante’s Inferno to Nosferatu and Mad Monster Party. It also plays a large role in politics—as in the demonizing, by the far right, of Barack … Continue reading

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