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Dante's Divine Comedy, the most sublime religious poem the Christian West has produced in two thousand years, provides us to this day with profound insights into human nature. In the Inferno Dante provides us with a vivid, unforgettable image of what Christians have always believed about sodomites. He places them in the seventh circle of Hell, the fiery circle of the violent, far below the lustful heterosexuals of the second circle. Why this big separation? The answer is extremely important and revealing. Dante wants us to understand that homosexuals do not suffer in life from a deficiency of the will,...

    Tastes and interests change in literature. Different themes, different styles, indeed whole different genres come in and out of being depending on the spirit of the age.     Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a “classical” style—not in a restricted sense as the style of Greco-Roman antiquity, nor any later genre which took inspiration from it—but rather a super-cultural literary style that rises up above its own genre and belongs as much to the ages as its own time period.     This is the old concept of the “Republic of Letters”—a community not of time and space...

Discovering Dante's Damsel in Distress Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News A Majolica Jug: Missing Link? Dec. 1, 2003 — A 14th century jug unearthed in a Tuscan castle might shed new light on one of the most touching and mysterious female figures in Dante's Divine Comedy, according to Italian archaeologists. Legend has always linked Castel di Pietra, a castle near the village of Gavorrano in the Tuscan Maremma, with the sad fate of Pia dei Tolomei, a lady supposedly imprisoned there and then murdered by her jealous husband. "Do thou remember me who am the Pia/ Siena made me, unmade me...

Remember limbo, that place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized because they do not deserve either heaven or hell? Pope John Paul (news - web sites) showed on Thursday that he still muses about one of the more forgotten elements of Catholic theology commonly associated with medieval thinking. He asked theologians to think about it harder and come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocents. According to Catholic teaching, baptism removes the original sin which has stained all souls since the fall from grace...

“THE ONE GOOD THING TO DO WITH MONEY” Collections of letters can be charming. One of the things I like best about them, and I like this about journals and essay collections also, is that they can be so random. One’s day is not usually an organized treatise in which one thing flows directly from another in some logical patter. I have nothing against logic or organization, but I rather like to live in a world in which I am not quite sure what will happen next. I like it when folks can just “drop by.” The end of my...

A Muslim rights advocate has scored a victory over the Catholic Church and conservative Italians, winning a court ruling that will remove crucifixes from the state primary school his children attend. "The presence of the symbol of the cross shows the will of the state to put Catholicism at the centre of the universe as the absolute truth," Judge Mario Montanaro ruled in the central town of L'Aquila. A concordat with the Vatican confirmed in 1984 that Catholicism was no longer the state religion. And laws introduced in 1920s fascist Italy, making crucifixes mandatory in classrooms, have been interpreted loosely...

"Through me the way into the suffering city, Through me the way to the eternal pain, Through me the way that runs among the lost. Justice urged on my high artificer; My maker was divine authority, The highest wisdom, and the primal love. Before me nothing but eternal things were made, And I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye who enter here." While using the internet as a resource to develop a homeschool curriculum for my 12 year old, I stumbled across a wonderful resource that I feel I must share with my fellow Freepers found here. The author uses...

We wake up in the morning, and our evil deeds begin before we have time to curse the alarm. As we slept, our refrigerators were hard at work giving Chileans skin cancer. We turn on the air conditioner, and amphibians grow extra limbs. We breathe and contribute to global warming. We put on our clothes and cover the world with sweatshops. We slip on our athletic shoes and tie children to workbenches with the laces. We poison the soil by eating breakfast. We drive to work and drown Pacific Islanders. We go to the doctor and kill animals. We devastate...