Books – Page 4

David Meredith, Aaru: Dante’s Path (The Aaru Cycle Book 3) (2020)

December 13, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“The virtual paradise of Aaru is destroyed. The lords and ladies are overthrown. Most of the Vedas are captured, and Magic Man’s dark creation, Hel rules with an iron fist, exacting her horrible revenge.

“Arch Veda Rose is afraid it’s all her fault. While the defeated lords and ladies sequester themselves in the impregnable tree-fortress of Yggdrasil, Rose decides it is up to her to make things right. Together she, and her bitter rival Matteus decide to work together to secretly infiltrate Hel’s Kingdom of Dis and rescue their tormented friends.

“At the same time, Koren has struggles of her own, mourning the untimely death of her father and separation from her sister Rose even as the corrupt megachurch pastor, Benjamin Belial, inserts himself deeper and deeper into her life, affairs, and family, and public opinion turns increasingly against Elysian Industries. Though worlds apart, both sisters must traverse a proverbial Dante’s Path with no guarantee of success or survival.” –David Meredith, Amazon, 2020.

Fr. Paul Pearson, Spiritual Direction From Dante: Ascending Mount Purgatory (2020)

December 13, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Join Father Paul Pearson of the Oratory as he guides you on a spiritual journey through one of the great classics of Christian literature, Dante’s Purgatorio. Purgatory is the least understood of the three possible “destinations” when we die (though unlike heaven or hell it is not an eternal one) and is mysterious to many Christians and even to many Catholics today. As he did in his first volume in the Spiritual Direction from Dante trilogy, Avoiding the Inferno, Father Pearson adroitly draws out the great spiritual insights hidden in The Divine Comedy.” [. . .] –Fr. Paul Pearson, Amazon, 2020.

Lawrence M. Ludlow, “Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Divine Origins of the Free Market”

December 6, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“We already are familiar with the Marxian social gospel that is so popular among many current theologians and their followers. In the verses I will cite, Dante himself voices an understanding of the marketplace that shares this erroneous communitarian view of economics. In particular, he describes his adherence to what is known among libertarians as the fallacy of zero-sum economics. Those who hold the zero-sum view claim that in a free marketplace, the gains of one participant are exactly balanced by the losses of another. If the total of the gains and losses are added up, the sum will be zero. In other words, if the sum total of all wealth were embodied in a single chocolate cake, one person’s share of cake would be another’s loss. Furthermore, the addition of each new market participant requires the slicing of thinner and thinner pieces of this cake. We libertarians, of course, despise this theory. If it were correct, the seven billion inhabitants of planet Earth would now be sharing and dividing infinitesimally small pieces of the very same chocolate cake that was first made available in the mists of Mexican pre-history. If such were true, I frankly wonder if there would be so much as a single calorie available to any of us – and very stale calories at that. Furthermore, the current spectacle of American obesity appears to belie this interpretation without my assistance.

“But as soon as Dante expresses his zero-sum analysis of marketplace economics, Virgil – who acts as Dante’s divinely appointed guide throughout his journey down into the Inferno and during his wonderful ascent of the Purgatorio – immediately upbraids him and provides the correct alternative, an unabashed free-market perspective. In Dante’s poem, this perspective is a reflection of the divine perspective of God. Let’s now examine the text itself.” [. . .] –Lawrence M. Ludlow, Strike The Root, May 14, 2013.

John Took, Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide (2020)

November 23, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, a poet who, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘divides the world with Shakespeare, there being no third.’ His, like ours, was a world of moral uncertainty and political violence, all of which made not only for the agony of exile but for an ever deeper meditation on the nature of human happiness.

“In Why Dante Matters, John Took offers by way of three in particular of Dante’s works – the Vita Nova as the great work of his youth, the Convivio as the great work of his middle years and the Commedia as the great work of his maturity – an account, not merely of Dante’s development as a poet and philosopher, but of his continuing presence to us as a guide to man’s wellbeing as man.

“Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those ‘who will deem this time ancient,’ Dante’s is in this sense a discourse overarching the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller.” —Bloomsbury

See also the Virtual book launch event held at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Study, November 24, 2020.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108” in Dreamtigers

November 23, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Beside a road there is a stone face and an inscription that says, ‘The True Portrait of the Holy Face of the God of Jaen.’ If we truly knew what it was like, the key to the parables would be ours and we would know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of God.

“Paul saw it as a light that struck him to the ground; John, as the sun when it shines in all its strength; Teresa de Jesus saw it many times, bathed in tranquil light, yet she was never sure of the color of His eyes.

“We lost those features, as one may lose a magic number made up of the usual ciphers, as one loses an image in a kaleidoscope, forever. We may see them and know them not. The profile of a Jew in the subway is perhaps the profile of Christ; perhaps the hands that give us our change at a ticket window duplicate the ones some soldier nailed one day to the cross.

Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us.” [. . .] –Jorge Luis Borges, The Floating Library, September 15, 2008.

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