Ghulf Genes

Google’s search page reminded me of Rodin’s The Thinker again, it being the 172nd birthday of August Rodin today. This in turn moved me ...

What with the elevation of Hildegard of Bingen to the status of a Doctor of the Church, I was looking back to the times when she lived, the...

I happened across an evidently well-known Virgil quote yesterday on Laudator . It must be well known because I found it easy to get a transl...

One of our most persistent tendencies as humans is to produce the mirage of the Golden Age. We project this age both backward and forward in...

The chief marker of a secular era is its worldly and temporal character—this in contrast to a religious era in which the spiritual and etern...

It gives me a certain satisfaction to be able to announce—a mere day after I learned of this event—that one of my great literary heroes (the...

I spent much time during the last half of 2009 getting to know Dante and his era. Dante saw his times with anguish. The universal state (the...

The strange thing to your left is the photo of something like a map; it is called the Rand McNally Histomap of World History , by John B. Sp...

The Wayne Country Treasurer once more issued a paid supplement to the Detroit Free Press advertising listings of forfeited properties subje...

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could s...

In Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, we enter a high heaven, that of Jupiter, where warrior saints have their space of manifestation. And up ...

It brought me wry amusement to discover the following stanza in Dante’s Paradiso last night. It comes from Canto XVII in which Dante encoun...

Virgil was born in Mantua, in Northern Italy. And Dante was born in—and exiled from—Florence, located just to the south and east of Mantua,...

A few years ago Monique gave me Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran —and just tracing that experience would suffice for a post. For one t...

All hope abandon if you hope to scale the peak That Dante mastered in his own medieval time— Unless you are prepared by effort now to seek T...

She is known to the public (if known by name at all) as the creator of a fictional detective, Lord Peter Whimsey. Most people of my generati...