Evening under Lamplight Podcast

We have some questions answered, which helpfully shift our perspective on things so we see the world, and the poem, in a rich way.

Dante meets some of the souls in the sphere of the Moon, and learn their story, which is puzzling, if not shocking. There is a lot of turning around here, and we perhaps need our own sense of things turned around too.

Some advice to the readers, followed by a complicated explanation of the spots on the moon, setting out for us the whole arrangement of the heavens, filled with varied individual personalities.

We begin Series 6, as we move into the third part of Dante's Divine Comedy - the Paradiso. The canto opens with an odd kind of invocation, and then Dante takes off for his first stop in the heavens, but is filled with questions about how and why he's rising up so quickly. He's rather disoriented, but we try to help him out as we read.

We're at the final canto of the Purgatorio, with the final words of Beatrice before they ascend, and Dante's renewing dip in the waters of the Eunoë, but with no time left for him to describe what that experience was like.

The third and final part of the discussion, taking us through that inspiring essay "A Christmas Sermon" and its call to us to be "faithful failures".

Part 2 of the discussion of Stevenson's "Christmas Sermon", this episode focusing on a slightly earlier essay, "A Chapter on  Dreams".

Here's a three-part podcast looking at "A Christmas Sermon", an unconventional  Christmas essay that appeared in the December, 1888, issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine. In part 1 we get some background.

Beatrice, no longer scolding, shows Dante a masque, or allegorical drama, featuring destructive monsters and the original Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - which provides some fruitful lessons for us.

Dante's formal confession, contrition, and absolution as he moves through Lethe Water, into new life, and glorious vision.