Guy teaching Dante, 700 years dead, every year for 25 years at University of Dallas writes paean which proves that practice doesn't make perfect

But for boring, uninspiring, and convoluted, it's a masterpiece.

Culture and enlightenment are powerless against delusions such as astrology

But in another way . . . antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. ... The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance . . .. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence. The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs. ... It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 313f.

Clinton v Trump: Who is worse morally?

Donald Trump is notorious for his sexual promiscuity.

Hillary Clinton is widely distrusted as an inveterate liar, including about even such small matters as the provenance of her own name.

Which is worse?

The answer from Dante's Inferno puts The Donald in the second circle of hell with all the lustful, just beneath Limbo, and Hillary in the eighth circle with all the fraudulent, just above Lucifer the father of lies, who is trapped in the ice at the very pit of hell.

So Rod Dreher's had another crisis: How many is that now?

The Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox lost a sibling and turned . . . to a therapist, at the age of 46 or so, and after all that.

Christianity does attract a certain sort of person. Its founders were peculiar too. Who knows. Maybe you have to be quite nuts to found a religion.

I suspect this isn't the last time we'll hear that Rod Dreher has had another crisis, but I do hope it is. 

The story is here.

The Children Of Hell

Gustave Dore "Hypocrites" in Circle 8

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."

-- Matthew 23:15