How Dante Can Save Your Life - A Review

I have subjected my daughter to a “Great Conversations” curriculum for her high school homeschool. She is of the bookish sort, so the large volume of reading is really up her alley.

This year, at the beginning of the year, she is staring down Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Dante’s Divine Comedy at roughly the same time. Spenser is in her English literature curriculum, with Dante occupying a prime place (about 1/6th of the year) in her Great Conversations course. There is overlap between the courses, though Great Conversations tends to be as much about history and philosophy as literary value.

In any case with my dear daughter bowed under the weight of two classic, but challenging, texts, I felt compelled to find her some resources (besides my fervent assurance) that they volumes are very much worth the labor to read and understand them.

I have heard Rod Dreher’s 2015 book, How Dante Can Save Your Life recommended by some that know Dante well. Even some that find Dreher’s more recent work in The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies a bit too political and panicked have recommended the volume.

There is good reason for the recommendation. This is a good book. It’s not quite the commentary on Dante that I was looking for, but it tells a good story, it uses Dante’s Divine Comedy as a framework, and engages the mind and heart in the pursuit of truth.

Like most converts to anything, Dreher has strong opinions. The story he tells in How Dante Can Save Your Life has strong ties to Dreher’s opinions about the value of Roman Catholicism he left from his earlier Methodism, and the Orthodoxy that Dreher adopted after he became disgusted with the Catholic hierarchy after sitting under a liberal priest and reporting on the Roman Catholic sex scandals in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. There is a lot of veneration of icons, exorcisms, and ritualistic prayers in the book that will make those familiar with Scripture, especially the second commandment (or the 2nd half of the first commandment in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition) very uncomfortable. At the same time, there is a real discovery of grace and the ability to forgive that provides the climax of the book.

This is a story of homegoing. After the death of his sister––whose legacy Dreher memorialized in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming––Dreher and his family moved back to rural Louisiana. Dreher expected to be welcomed back, but found himself alienated from his family and depressed. The stress of his anger at his perceived mistreatment left him with a significant bout of chronic fatigue.

How Dante Can Save Your Life is a story of Dreher finding his way out of a pit of depression and learning to forgive his family. It involves regular counselling, ascetic spiritual practices, and a deep dive into Dante’s epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and finally on to Paradise.

As I have said, this is not primarily a commentary on Dante. However, as Dreher follows Dante on his journey, we see how a great work of literature can have a significant impact on the mind, body, and soul. Dreher’s telling of his own story maps well onto Dante’s journey of self-discovery. Although the story is more about Dreher than Dante, it is well-told and it does illuminate the power of the Divine Comedy many centuries after it was first penned.

This book is impressive because it was written to a broad audience. Dreher invites secular readers into a moral vision that points toward Christianity. It isn’t clearly stated, but the Dreher offers and invitation to the reader to be conformed to the moral order of the universe. Through his own story of discovering joy in chastity, even the atheist can see the value in the discipline of sexual restraint and seeking persistent love before conjugal relations.

Dreher provides some resolution to the tension of the story, but it is a powerful twist on the ending one might expect. If this were a sitcom, then Dreher would have been received with open arms by his family, everyone would apologize and the wrongs of previous years forgotten. As it stands, Dreher recounts his coming the point of being able to forgive despite not receiving many concessions from the family who held him at a distance. In this Dreher provides a picture of the most likely reality. We do not always get to live happily ever after, but we get many opportunities to choose to be as happy as we can be in a given circumstance.

This is Dreher’s book telling Dreher’s story. There are points at which one wonders if the narrator can be fully trusted. Although Dreher admits to some of his own failings, it is clear that he believes the fault is mainly on the other side. The reader is left wondering whether Dreher is entirely fair to the rest of his family. The downside of the book is that the reading of it feels a little voyeuristic. One wonders how the rest of the family feels about his publication of this volume.

If you can get over the feeling that there might be too much dirty laundry exposed in this volume, the book is well worth reading. I’m offering it as an auxiliary volume for the Great Conversations curriculum as a way to see the value of Dante. It also offers a thoughtful portrait of redemption and forgiveness. These are all things that deserved to be explored in greater detail by all of us, especially by those trying to figure out why the books consistently chosen for a Great Conversations curriculum belong there.

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

By Dreher, Rod

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Another Sort of Learning - A Review

The Preacher who gave us Ecclesiastes famously wrote, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecc 1:9)

This is true in many arenas, but those who read old books will find it true of controversies, antagonisms, and the general feel of cultural unrest. C. S. Lewis recommends reading old books “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” (Lewis, “On Reading Old Books”) It is by reading old books that we gain a corrective to the characteristic blind spots of our own culture.

I’m not sure if James Schall’s book, Another Sort of Learning, counts as an old book, since it was published in 1988, but it had a revealing effect for me. Schall’s book is worth considering on its own, but it also provides evidence that today’s cultural battles are not really that new. More than thirty years ago, Schall was calling out the same problems that might be the source of concern in The American Conservative, First Things, or National Review today. That doesn’t mean that the concern is not warranted, but rather that we might be better served by recognizing that this election or this court case or this movie may not actually be the straw that broke the camels back. It may be, but that seems less and less likely the older I get. There is nothing new under the sun.

In Another Sort of Learning, Schall writes “about being a student, about reading, about the fact that each of us is called to understand. . . ‘the truth about our lives.’” This is a book that discusses other books that can help shape the mind. It is a book about thinking well, appreciation of the transcendentals, and recommendations of others who are thinking along the same vein.

Contents

The book is divided into three parts. The first is addressed to college students, pointing them toward what their goal as students ought to be. Schall expresses concern that students seek to answers to the big questions of life, rather than simply learning a trade. The whole of this section is framed around that. In his first essay, “Another Sort of Learning,” Schall commends used book stores for being able to find the right sorts of books that are often not in as regular circulation. A lovely way to begin an engaging book.

The second part of the volume recommends “Books You Will Never Be Assigned.” Here offers to “provide reviews of certain books that I think help us gain some insight into the heart of reality.” These are mainly modern books with an ancient soul. They are the sorts of secondary literature that take the Great Conversation seriously and try to engage it meaningfully rather than demonstrate why it is a foolish attempt. For those with a hefty book budget, these are chapters ripe with suggestion.

Part Three seeks to provide an alternative viewpoint to the most common modern perspective. Schall states, “I want to discuss rather substantive things, both intellectual and spiritual. Here I want to say something about the humanities, about devotion, prayer, something more, again, about permanent things.” Here he again is recommending volumes that pull readers deeper into the idea of reality about the universe, rather than directing them to their own reality.

Conclusion

Another Sort of Learning is a deeply conservative book. Not the sort of conservatism that produces strong tweets or rages against the right enemies, but the sort of conservatism that digs deep into the intellectual realities of the world and seeks to find truth, goodness, and beauty. It is a sort of reactionary perspective that is revulsed by the evils of modernity, looking to the solidity of the past for a conversation of substance.

One of the interesting benefits of reading a book like this over thirty years old is that it skips a generation. The authors that I recognize are mainly the ones still being discussed today, so Schall’s reading lists can point us back to older books of substances that may further help clear away the cobwebs of the contemporary cacophony. There is nothing new under the sun, but Schall provides access to the ongoing debates that doesn’t include the gaps and blind spots of the latest cycle of blogs.

Another benefit of Another Sort of Learning is that Schall describes the same sorts of problems being lamented by thoughtful people today. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. On one hand, the continuance of this concern about the loss of the transcendentals is discouraging because we have not made much progress. On the other hand, the continuance of concern on this issue shows that we have not altogether lost the fight. This is an encouraging volume that is worth the time to read. The essays are no worse for being more than thirty years old. Maybe they are even better for it.  Overall, the collection is well-written and engaging, perfect for taking a chapter at a time after a long day at work.

Another Sort of Learning

By James V. Schall

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Homeschooling - Our Freshman Curriculum

Homeschool continues to grow in popularity. Some of this is due to curriculum concerns. Some due to COVID protocols and the unpredictability of schools that continue to alternate between in person and remote learning. Others, I think, have leaned toward homeschooling because the homebound instruction during the earliest stages of the pandemic showed them that parent-led learning was possible.

There are many reasons to homeschool, but I think the best reasons include it being a form of learning that fits the needs of the student. So, for example, it may be better for a student with special needs to get the attention available from a local public school. Or, for a parent and child whose personalities clash, it may be better to commit to a private religious school. For those of us that have options, it is good to consider which one serves the student the best.

My family committed to homeschooling early on and it is has worked well for us. One of the enjoyable parts of the high school experience has been shaping a curriculum that fits the personality of our eldest and will push her to grow as a person as a student.

Since she is very verbal student, there is a lot of reading in her curriculum. We value the Great Conversation, so I have made an effort to begin her high school with ancient cultures and texts, with the intention of getting her into the modern era when she is a senior.

In case some might find it helpful, I am going to describe her freshman curriculum here.

Math and Science

We purchased Math and Science curricula off the shelf. Math has been a source of parent-child stress over the years with our oldest student, so we used Thinkwell’s homeschool honors Algebra I material for the freshman year. It has tended to make the learning process much less stressful and it is a solid, interactive mathematics course. For science, our homeschool co-op was doing the Marine Biology labs from Apologia’s catalog. The community support for that worked well for us.

Critical Thinking

The learning outcomes for this course are:

1. Learn to think well, fairly, honestly, and clearly about big ideas.

2. Consider how thinking well supports living a moral life.

These outcomes will follow through all four years of this approach. In support of this, our student had to read volumes that were selected to get her thinking about the world, about ideas, and about how thinking takes place. I had her read:

C. S. Lewis, “On Reading Old Books”

Lloyd Alexander, The Gawgon and the Boy

Epstein and Kerberger, Critical Thinking

Bluedorn and Bluedorn, The Thinking Toolbox

Bluedorn and Bluedorn, The Fallacy Detective

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Dogma is the Drama”

C. S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry”

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Creative Mind”

Most of these resources are either directed thinking and logic explicitly or are from a friendly perspective. As she matures, the intention is to put more challenging perspectives into this mix.

English Literature

Freshman English was intended to hit some of the high point English literature. This was intended to complement another course in the homeschool co-op that ended up cancelled. I will probably revise this for the next two, but this is how the year went. I had her read six novels over the course of the year. Given the extent of the reading for the Great Conversations portion of the curriculum, the brevity of this list did not seem problematic.

The learning outcomes for this course were:

1. Read significant works of English literature for familiarity and to engage with our shared culture.

2. Improve writing reading, thinking, and writing skills by summarizing books as they are read.

3. Appreciate the beauty of the written word in the English language.

4. Critically engage with literary themes in major works of fiction by writing essays that draw together themes and ideas.

The books selected were:

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

I had her do a little research on the historical context of each novel, a biographical summary of the author, and a brief summary of the work. Additionally, I assigned a 500-1,000 word essay on each novel.

The writing was supposed to be covered by the co-op class. So I hadn’t thought the essays through. This was a bit frustrating because of the quality of the work was not very good. Over the course of the year, I figured out this was because the student did not understand how to arrive at a thesis, and instead continually defaulted to attempting to compare and contrast works. I think my vision for these assignments was ahead of where she was developmentally. If I had this to do again, I would assign a thesis, which is what I did for Sophomore literature. For the Sophomore curriculum, I also made “literature” a parallel track to Great Conversations, to get more of the volumes from the same time period but read them from a more literary angle.

Spiritual Disciplines

One of the major reasons we homeschool is so that we can make spiritual disciplines a part of the curriculum. The learning outcomes for this course are:

1. Grow toward Christlikeness by reading and meditating on important books, both contemporary and historical.

2. Develop the practice of journaling as a discipleship tool.

As a result, the assignments were to do the reading and write a journal each week. The texts for the course were intended to reinforce Christian doctrine and faithful practice of spiritual disciplines. They included:

J. C. Ryle, Holiness.

Augustine, On Christian Teaching (or On Christian Doctrine).

Brother Lawrence, Practicing the Presence of God.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Dorothy L. Sayers, “Strong Meat” in The Whimsical Christian, 17-23.

Gloria Furman, Alive in Him.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

History

We have followed a basic 4-year cycle for much of our time homeschooling, though one year we substituted in a year-long study of the Eastern Hemisphere. The plan is to do another 4-year cycle through high school, this time including reading that accompanies the time period.

I chose Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the World series to use as a backbone. We had already purchased all four of her The Story of the World books and encouraged the kids to read them as supplements, so taking the step to the next level seemed appropriate. Additionally, Bauer seems to deal more fairly with Christianity than some approaches without slipping into pandering as do some of the overtly Christian approaches.

Bauer’s History of the World books have accompanying curriculum, which we purchased. In addition, I created a Google Classroom for this course with a topic per week. In the classroom, I linked a lot of the CrashCourse YouTube videos and other videos that help provide visual stimulation and additional support for the ideas in the curriculum. Each chapter also had an objective quiz in the classroom, so that we could monitor whether the reading was being done well enough without having to hover.

I scheduled about eight exams for the course of the year. Each of the exams was an essay question, with essays selected from a pre-published list of the long form questions in the History of the World student curriculum. It was an introduction to the Blue Book exams that were the torment of many college students.

The learning outcomes for Ancient History were:

1. Gain a sense of the trajectory of history, the development of human culture, and how motivations and ideas shape human responses to events.

2. Meditate on why studying history is a vital discipline for a virtuous life.

3. Think critically about politics, society, science, and culture to better engage a diverse world.

These learning outcomes will be common for the four years and are the target of the high school history program, not the focus of this year, only.

Old Testament

Again, one of the reasons we homeschool is to include religious instruction in our curriculum. Therefore, one of the subjects this year was a survey of the Old Testament. Once I figured out how the Google Classroom thing worked, I decided to give homemade Old Testament instruction a try.

In the past, I haven’t been as engaged in the teaching aspect of homeschool because I’ve been at work. However, by created a weekly video of me lecturing on a given topic or book of the Old Testament, I could be directly involved in instruction without being present during normal school hours or having to have energy on a given night.

And so, I put together a robust reading list, a set of standard objectives for each book of the Old Testament, a weekly quiz, and a video of me, filmed in my basement office. Additionally, I included one of the Bible Project videos for each book, and sometimes lectures or sermons on a specific verse or book that were helpful and instructive. To kick off the year, I had the student watch David Platt’s Secret Church videos where he goes through all of the Old Testament in about 4 hrs.

There were weekly quizzes, chapter exams, and self-reported Bible reading reports this year.

The Old Testament Learning Outcomes were:

1. Explain the overarching themes and message of every book in the Old Testament.

2. Gain a deeper appreciation for the gift of special revelation, particularly the Old Testament.

3. Defend Christianity against basic cultural criticism based on the nature and content of the Old Testament.

4. Explain the historical contours of the Old Testament History.

The reading list was extensive. There were selections from several other volumes, but the following books were assigned in their entirety (except for only reading the OT portions of Schreiner):

Mark Dever. The Message of the Old Testament. Wheaton: Crossway, 2006.

Andrew E. Hill and John H. Walton. A Survey of the Old Testament. 2nd Edition. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000.

Thomas Schreiner. The King in His Beauty. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013.

Michael Cosper. Faith Among the Faithless: Learning from Esther How to Live in a World Gone Mad. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2018.

C. S. Lewis. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: HarperCollins, 1958.

Francis Schaeffer. Genesis in Time and Space. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

_____. No Final Conflict. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

_____. Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

This amount of reading only works because the student is a high-level reader and because the reading makes up the bulk of the course content.

Great Conversations

The summer before starting high school, I assigned Sophie’s World to provide an introduction to the intellectual history of the West. Along with that, I assigned a list of names for the student to research and write a paragraph about, so the list of new characters would be diminished over the course of this first year.

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s essay “On Reading Old Books” this curriculum represents an attempt to go back to original sources. I decided it was better to try to hit some of the major works in full rather than trying to do selections of a wider range of sources. The readings were generally sorted in chronological order. I ordered standard English translations, usually from a recent source to try to get the best reading experience possible.

The course learning outcomes were:

1. Engage in the “Great Conversation” by reading books written by men of women of diverse backgrounds and eras to better understand the human condition.

2. Enrich the understanding of the history of ideas by reading primary sources to support the readings in history.

3. Meditate on why studying history is a vital discipline for a virtuous life.

4. Improve writing reading, thinking, and writing skills by summarizing books as they are read.

The assigned readings included:

Myths from Mesopotamia (Gilgamesh and Epic of Creation)

Homer’s Iliad

Homer’s Odyssey

OUP Presocratics volume, intro only

Finn, History: A Student’s Guide

Plato’s Republic

Plato, Defense of Socrates and Other Essays

Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric

Aristotle, Politics

Virgil, Aenid

Sima Qian, The First Emperor

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Confucius, The Analects

The Bhagavad Gita

Plato, Gorgias

Cicero, The Republic

Cicero, The Laws

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Cicero, On Life and Death

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Aeschylus, Libation Bearers

Aeschylus, The Eumenides

Euripides, Medea

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

1-2 Maccabees

Josephus, War of the Jews (Selections)

Early Christian Writings

Many of these were referenced in Bauer’s book in History, especially the non-Western texts. It wasn’t possible to line this reading up exactly with History, but there was enough overlap so there was plenty of interplay.

In addition to the reading, the only other assignment was to keep a notebook with a summary of the historical context, a biographical sketch of the author, and a summary of the work. I would check in with the student periodically to see how the reading was going. The written work was not always exemplary, but was good evidence through discussions that the reading was happening and things were beginning to come together. Many of these volumes could be the study of a lifetime, so the goal for this course is exposure and increasing appetite rather than getting everything from them on the first pass.

There is no question that this is a Western-heavy reading list. Since we live in the US and since many of these books have been so influential through history, this seems natural. I did, however, make an effort to include some significant texts from other ancient cultures. Ancient cultures of every sort are so foreign to ours that even the Western canon is a form of multi-culturalism, but these is something to be said for having read The Bhagavad Gita and Confucius’ Analects in addition to a fair amount of Plato and Aristotle.

Some experts in education will probably tell me that this volume of reading is excessive. Looking back, I would have cut a couple of volumes from this list. However, when you recall that this is both homework and class, the volume makes more sense.

Concluding Thoughts

This post is already too long, so I will save discussion about my philosophy of curriculum development for another post. This approach was possible largely because my student is a very motivated reader.

Raising kids and homeschooling is a decades long experiment with no control group. We will see how it goes, but this is part of the approach I’ve been using and I offer it for your information.