Pimps, remorse and blood. Dante's Divine Comedy and the critique of the Papacy
Dante encounters seven popes in the Divine Comedy, five in hell, one in purgatory and one in paradise - that last being Saint Peter. His condemnation of individual popes and, I think, the papacy is ex...
4 Mai 202548min
Is hell forever? The Inferno. Jason Baxter & Mark Vernon on Dante’s film noir
“Circles of hell" has become commonplace in language. But what was Dante trying to show us when he wrote the inferno? What has been lost in translation, with this first canticle in Dante’s trilogy now...
4 Okt 202459min
Is hell really boring? Rowan Williams & Jesse Armstrong, Dante & William Blake
Rowan Williams and Jesse Armstrong talked at The Idler festival, partly around the idea, caught in the expression, “boring as hell”. But is that right, they asked, when a drama like Succession so clea...
11 Jul 202432min
Dante and civilisational decline. A dispatch on disillusionment in politics
Dante lived through a period of almost total social collapse. Civil war and city-state terror, practiced by the church as much as secular powers, drove him into exile for the last 20 years of his life...
13 Jun 202414min
What is intelligence? Dante in an age of AI
Dante's imagery, particularly in the Paradiso, offers powerful prompts to developing the sense of what it is to be intelligent. He wrote for modern times, he said. And now, as AI becomes more pervasiv...
25 Nov 202342min
Seeing the Unsayable. Dante’s ineffable images
Reason fails before the greatest spiritual truths. That much is not news. But part of the genius of Dante is his conjuring of images that reach beyond the impasses of paradox and seeming contradiction...
5 Aug 202322min
Dante and the Meaning of Easter
What is the meaning of Easter? How might Holy Week be more than an occasion for its retelling? Can death and resurrection live today, as they once did, 2000 years ago? Dante’s journey, in the Divine ...
6 Apr 202327min
