The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have only ever read the Inferno and the Purgatorio in Ciardi's translation. I found the Paradiso in Mandelbaum's translation and could not make the transition between styles.
Someone got me this omnibus edition of Ciardi's translations, and I was excited to finally read the Paradiso in Ciardi's verse, but of course I let all sorts of lesser things get in the way and it sat on my shelf for a decade-ish.
I've finally gone back and read the whole thing through. I'm 25 years older and have learned to criticize the stuff I read rather than simply glide through it, mesmerized, like I used to do with all my favorite books when I was a youth. Not all positive. In any case, there are certainly patches where I suspect I would have found different words and a different tone.
Ciardi's introductions and notes were tremendously helpful to me when I was young. In fact, they were as important as the poem itself, if not more so, in the way reading the Divine Comedy introduced me to the whole medieval intellectual synthesis and the sense I have had ever since that there is a similar modern synthesis between science and Catholic faith, mediated by philosophy, waiting for us that would be far grander. So it is rather strange to me that now I almost feel they get in the way. I plan to read the book again and deliberately skip everything but the poem itself sometime in the next few years in preparation for a writing project I hope to dare to undertake.
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Episode 019 - Conclusion: SCS Conference
Episode 018 - SCS Conference: Peter Koellner, Andrew Sicree
Episode 017 - Aaron Schurger at SCSC: Fifty Years Without Free Will
Episode 016 - Valerio Scarani at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018
Episode 015 - Stephen Barr at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018
Episode 014 - Ed Feser's Keynote at SCS
Episode 013 - Human Mind and Physicalism (Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018)
Episode 012 - Society of Catholic Scientists
Episode 011 - Intellectual Citizenship (part 2)
Episode 010 - Intellectual Citizenship (part 1)
Episode 009 – Ways to Think of Science and Religion as Parallel
Episode 008 - Paradigm Shifts in Science and Religion
Bonus Episode - Science, Scholarship, and University Teaching
Episode 007 - Falsifiability and Scientific Revolutions
Episode 006 - Evolution in Christianity and Geology
Episode 005 - Evolution in Biology, Physics, and Faith
Episode 004 - Complexity, Cosmic Evolution, Change and Certainty
Episode 003 - Metaphysics and the Divorce between Science and Philosophy
Episode 002 - Is Your Metaphysics Up for This?
Episode 001 - Why You Shouldn't Stay in (but Should Learn from) the Second Millennium
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