I’m leaving tomorrow for a Liberty Fund conference, and need to finish today the proposal for my planned book on how Dante can save your life. The chief problem I’m struggling with in the proposal is how Christian to make the book.
Here’s what I mean. Mine will be a practical book about how going on this imaginative journey with the pilgrim Dante, through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and applying the insights he teaches you, can show you the way out of your own dark wood. It happened to me; it can happen to you. This is not a study in Dante, or if it is, it’s a very specific kind of study, one that is meant not only to be contemplated, but used. It is, of course, hard to write about the Commedia without putting God at the center of the experience, and I wouldn’t want to do that. But people do. Prue Shaw’s wonderful new introduction to Dante, published this week, explores the main themes in Dante’s work, but doesn’t really get into the God business — which is bizarre to me, but it’s a very fine book, if an incomplete one. Yesterday, it was announced that the Bard College Dante scholar Joseph Luzzi will be writing a memoir of how the Commedia got him through the death of his wife; he wrote a moving column in the NYTimes about this not long ago. Excerpt:
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