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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Dante & Me in the Desert

Come join me in Phoenix this week -- and support TAC
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I’ve never been to Phoenix, but that is changing later this week. Please come say hi and listen to Your Working Boy talk about how Dante changed his life, and can do the same for yours.

On Thursday night, I’ll be at a private fundraising reception for supporters of TAC. This will be a fairly intimate affair, and we’ll be able to talk in depth together about Dante, or whatever you’d like to talk about. Tickets are still available. 

On Friday night, I’ll be giving a free public lecture about How Dante Can Save Your Life, and signing books. The talk will be at 7pm at the Lund Center at Veritas Prep Academy, 3102 N. 56th Street, in Phoenix. Again, it’s free, and everybody is invited, but Veritas asks you please to register in advance here so they can know how many are coming.

I really think this is going to be a special night. I could not possibly be more enthusiastic about Dante. If you’re a lover of the Great Books, if you’re a lover of poetry, if you’re a religious believer, if you’re an Italophile, if you’re a classical educator, if a book has ever changed your life — if you are any of these people, then come out and let’s be together and talk about Dante. As I tell the audiences I’ve been talking to lately, I come to them not as any kind of scholar, but as a witness, as someone who saw something bright and beautiful and life-changing in this poem, and who cannot wait to tell others about the wonders within it, and show them how the Divine Comedy can change their lives too.

A reader wrote to me last night to say he was afraid to read the Divine Comedy, because he was not sure how it would change him. I told him that’s actually not a bad way to think of it, because there is great power in this poem. But I gave him the advice that Mr. and Mrs. Beaver gave the children about Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

Dante isn’t safe. But he’s good. Come and hear, and then see for yourself.

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