Whether through a film, through a replay in other literature, through a videogame, or through any one of a thousand misunderstood references to that line about “Abandon all hope,” practically everyone in the modern West has encountered the Inferno. But how many of us have managed to sit down and read it? How many have sat down to read it slowly, thoughtfully, with a chance to feel its full power and begin thinking through the depths of what it can offer? If you answered “not very many,” we agree on an essential point! Join us this spring as we follow Dante’s descent into the underworld at an even more gradual pace than usual: in general we’ll take just two cantos (about seven pages) each week.
If you are new to Dante, you’re in for a delight — not only deep insights into psychology, philosophy and theology (though there will be plenty of that), but above all the discovery that the poem delivers all that in a very accessible way, giving the impression, as a 20th-century commentator put it, of listening to someone sitting in an armchair and telling you a story. And if you have read the poem one or more times already, you can expect that our slow and focused attention, the discussion among our group of thoughtful readers, and the guidance of an experienced teacher and writer about Dante will add up to insights, appreciation, and enjoyment that you haven’t seen before.
One meeting time on Mondays, 7 p.m. EST; other meetings possible depending on group interest, so please contact us ASAP to express interest!
If you are interested in discovering how the Christian church has related to scripture since its beginning, and in exploring what happens when those traditional ways of reading, study, and prayer meet the newer approaches that have arisen in the last few centuries, this group is for you! We are reading some of the most thoughtful and influential writings on the Bible that Christianity has produced, weighing the often surprising ideas of “church fathers” and other important writers on questions like:
* What, if anything, does one need to know in advance in order to read the Bible well?
* When should scripture be read “literally” or “historically,” and when is it better to find in it an “allegorical” meaning? Can a single passage have more than one meaning?
* What should be taken into account in determining a passage’s
meaning or meanings? The intention of the (human) author? Previous knowledge about God? About the world? The intention of the reader? (Various church fathers proposed all of these!)
* What does it mean to say that the Bible is “true,” or, to use a later word, “inerrant”? Must “inerrancy” mean that every fact narrated in scripture happened exactly as described? If not, what other kinds of truth exist, and how do we tell which passages have which kind?
This spring we’ll begin with famous medieval “exegetes” like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and probably Nicholas of Lyra, then turn to the 17th-century birth of modern “historical-critical” methods and the process by which most branches of Christianity have moved from an initial rejection to a cautious dependence on those methods (e.g. in the 1943 Catholic encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu). We’ll leave time at the end for movements like “postliberalism” or “narrative theology” that try to combine old and new by drawing simultaneously on recent attempts to analyze what we do when we interpret texts and on the church’s traditional affirmation that some texts are “inspired” in a special way.
Join us! Begins in early March and runs to June. Here too the meeting times are TBD, so contact us to express a preference!
TheTreasures.org hosts online reading groups designed to provide access to texts that are endlessly engaging, thought-provoking, possibly life-transforming — and typically texts that few people would work their way through on their own.
When one no longer has to work on one’s own, what once seemed a daunting task changes into a joyful experience, a highlight of the week: discovering that a “classic” like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is not a far-off block of impenetrable literary marble, but a living, changing artwork that has vital things to say to us, and perhaps to do to us, in our twenty-first-century lives.