Esolen, a Catholic, writes on a broad field of topics—literature, the arts, and social commentary—and is known as a conservative and a traditionalist scholar. Professor Esolen, who had taught in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College for twenty-seven years, Professor Esolen criticized the concept of "diversity" as the term is commonly used in the modern academy and became the target of a campus protest. The administration's actions in response to this protest influenced his decision to leave Providence College.[6][7]
Esolen began teaching English at Providence College in 1990, becoming a full professor in 1995.[10] He earned a reputation as a conservative Catholic author, and grew increasingly dissatisfied with the more liberal activist direction of Providence College, a Catholic university run by the Dominican Order.[7][12] He is a critic of "diversity" training and guidelines as practiced at many American colleges and universities. In the summer of 2016, he remarked, "What counts for them as 'diversity' is governed entirely by a monotonous and predictable list of current political concerns. If you read a short story written in English by a Latina author living up the road in Worcester, that counts as 'diverse,' but if you read a romance written in Spanish by a Spanish author living in Spain four hundred years ago, that does not count as 'diverse.'"[13]
In September 2016, Crisis Magazine published an article by Esolen titled "My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult."[7]Crisis Magazine wrote the title for the piece, according to Esolen. In the essay, Esolen argued that Western insistence on a modern politically-defined idea of diversity as one of its core values was destructive to authentic cultures and was inherently contradictory to the Christian faith. He stated that people can only "be truly at one" when they are united by faith in God. Questioning the very western idea of diversity, he asked:
Is not that same call for diversity, when Catholics are doing the calling, a surrender of the Church to a political movement which is, for all its talk, a push for homogeneity, so that all the world will look not like the many-cultured Church, but rather like the monotone non-culture of western cities that have lost their faith in the transcendent and unifying God?[14]
Esolen held that Catholicism "redeems not only individuals but peoples" preserving their culture as it does so, which is in contrast to "the secular preachers of diversity" who work "their hardest to efface that difference, to muffle all those who speak with the voice of the Church against the vision that those preachers have to offer—a vision that pretends to be 'multicultural,' but that is actually anti-cultural, and is characterized by all the totalitarian impulses to use the massive power of government to bring to heel those who decline to go along."[14] He held that procedures turning over reported bias to a bias response team, was analogous to the infamous Star Chamber.[14] Esolen maintained that supporting identity politics is not possible within Catholicism, since "a disordered inclination" can not be held to be an essential component of any person .[14] Esolen further maintained that by backing the diversity program some faculty had called into question whether "it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?"[14] These faculty members, he said, "have made life hell for more than one of my friends" and some of them "would silence us for good, if they had the power."[14]
Some students and faculty members of Providence College reacted with anger to the publication of the essay. Student and faculty activists organized a protest march against him. The faculty of the college were deeply divided in their response to this protest. Some wrote a petition in which they charged that Esolen's writings contained repeated "racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic and religiously chauvinist statements. Others wrote in defense of both Esolen and of the need for freedom of expression for everyone on college campuses.[15] The Rev. Brian Shanley, O.P., President of Providence College at the time, publicly distanced himself from Esolen's statements by claiming "that he speaks only for himself. He certainly does not speak for me, my administration, and for many others at Providence College who understand and value diversity in a very different sense from him."[12] Meanwhile, Robert P. George, a conservative Catholic professor at Esolen's alma mater, Princeton University, defended him. He argued that students and faculty members who disagree with him "should respond in the currency of academic discourse—reasons, evidence, arguments—not by attempting to isolate, stigmatize, and marginalize him for stating dissenting opinions."[16]
Subsequent career
On May 4, 2017, it was announced that Esolen would join the faculty at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire beginning the fall of 2017. On this occasion, he criticized the Providence College administration for becoming too "secular."[7] In an essay praising his relationships at his new job, he said working at Providence was like "trying to shore up a crumbling wall" where the leadership was striving to "pass out lemonade to the professors with the sledge hammers."[17]
On May 13, 2019, Esolen resigned from Thomas More due to a serious health problem.[18][19] Esolen later accepted a position closer to his home, as Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence at the former Northeast Catholic College (now Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts).[20]
Literary work
Along with teaching, Esolen has published articles and books on a regular basis. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat and serves as a senior editor of Touchstone.[21]
Esolen's verse translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy into English was published by Random House Modern Library. His translation of the Inferno appeared in 2002, the Purgatory in 2003, and the Paradise in 2005.[22] In his translations, Esolen chose not to attempt a "preservation of Dante's rhyme in any systematic form."[23] Dante's original Italian work relied heavily on rhyme. However, the English language has fewer rhyming words than the Italian language. Thus, according to Esolen, trying to recreate the sounds of the original Italian rhyme would have compromised "either meaning or music."[8]
In lieu of Dante's famous terza rima, Esolen's translation is written in the preferred meter of such English poets as Shakespeare and Tennyson, blank verse. Esolen writes that the use of strictly metered blank verse allows him to retain both the "meaning [and the] music" of Dante's original. The works also feature, alongside the English translation, the original Italian text. Esolen notes that this text "is based on the editions of Giorgio Petrocchi (1965) and Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio" (1979)." Finally, the translations include Esolen's notes and commentary on the text, as well as illustrations by Gustave Doré.[23] Esolen kept his most extensive notes for the back of each book, so as not to interrupt the reading of the main text. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a professor emerita of English at the City University of New York, praised the translation for being "not only highly readable, but also vigorous and beautiful."[8]
He has argued that the Middle Ages were actually an enlightened time, so that the term "Dark Ages" is a misnomer. He cited the establishment of universities, the development of the carnival, and the contributions of famous saints such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to science and philosophy, all of which took place in the Middle Ages, as examples.[24]
In 2011, Esolen published an essay in First Things in which he criticized what he saw as the "bumping boxcar language" of the New American Bible. Esolen cited the NAB translations for "[p]refer[ing] the general to the specific, the abstract to the concrete, the vague to the exact." He went on to list several examples of Biblical passages in which he claimed that the true meaning or visceral nature of the words had been eroded.[25]
Publications
Translations
The following works were translated into English by Esolen:[22]
Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World. Regnery Gateway. 2018. ISBN978-1621578017.
How the Church has Changed the World - Vol. I. Magnificat. 2019. ISBN978-1949239041.
Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World. TAN Books March 25, 2019 ISBN978-1-50511-242-9
How the Church has Changed the World - Vol. II. Magnificat. 2020. ISBN978-1949239300.
In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. Angelico Press, 2021. ISBN9781621387978
Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind. Ignatius Press. 2020. ISBN9781621643067
No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. Regnery Publishing. 2022. ISBN9781684512348
The Lies of Our Time. Sophia Institute Press. 2023. ISBN9781644138021
Related Research Articles
Dante Alighieri, most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, which usually is translated into English as On the Nature of Things—and somewhat less often as On the Nature of the Universe. Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certainty is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated. De rerum natura was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil and Horace. The work was almost lost during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany by Poggio Bracciolini and it played an important role both in the development of atomism and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism.
Desiderius, also known as Daufer or Dauferius, was king of the Lombards in northern Italy, ruling from 756 to 774. The Frankish king of renown, Charlemagne, married Desiderius's daughter and subsequently conquered his realm. Desiderius is remembered for this connection to Charlemagne and for being the last Lombard ruler to exercise regional kingship.
De rerum natura is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. Namely, Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.
Allen Mandelbaum was an American professor of literature and the humanities, poet, and translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian. His translations of classic works gained him numerous awards in Italy and the United States.
Robert V. Young, Jr. is a professor of Renaissance Literature and Literary Criticism in the English Department of North Carolina State University, co-founder and co-editor of the John Donne Journal, and author of multiple books and articles primarily related to the study of literature. He became the editor of the conservative quarterly Modern Age in 2007.
Romano Guardini was an Italian, naturalized German Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian.
Eva Mary Barbara Reynolds was an English scholar of Italian Studies, lexicographer and translator. She wrote and edited several books concerning Dorothy Sayers and was president of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. She turned 100 in June 2014. Her first marriage was to the philologist and translator Lewis Thorpe.
Tityos or Tityus was a giant from Greek mythology.
The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is a private Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Merrimack, New Hampshire. It emphasizes classical education in the Catholic intellectual tradition and is named after Saint Thomas More. It is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. It is endorsed by The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College.
Robert Royal is a Catholic author and the president of the Faith & Reason Institute based in Washington, D.C.
Franz Hettinger was a German Catholic theologian.
Monarchia, often called De Monarchia, is a Latin treatise on secular and religious power by Dante Alighieri, who wrote it between 1312 and 1313. With this text, the poet intervened in one of the most controversial subjects of his period: the relationship between secular authority and religious authority. Dante's point of view is known on this problem, since during his political activity he had fought to defend the autonomy of the city-government of Florence from the temporal demands of Pope Boniface VIII. The work was banned by the Catholic Church in 1585.
Paget Jackson Toynbee, FBA was a British Dante scholar. Robert Hollander has described Toynbee as 'the most influential Dantean scholar of his time'.
Ernest Koliqi was an Albanian journalist, pro-Axis politician, translator, teacher and writer.
Thomas Goddard Bergin was an American scholar of Italian literature, who was "noted particularly for his research on Dante's Divine Comedy and for its translation". He was the Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University, and Master of Timothy Dwight College. He is the first poet to have his words launched into outer space to orbit the Earth.
Academic bias is the bias or perceived bias of scholars allowing their beliefs to shape their research and the scientific community. It can refer to several types of scholastic prejudice, e.g., logocentrism, phonocentrism, ethnocentrism or the belief that some sciences and disciplines rank higher than others.
The political views of American academics began to receive attention in the 1930s, and investigation into faculty political views expanded rapidly after the rise of McCarthyism. Demographic surveys of faculty that began in the 1950s and continue to the present have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives, particularly among those who work in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers and pundits disagree about survey methodology and about the interpretations of the findings.
1 2 3 Gardiner, Anne Barbeau (June 2004). "Eternal Consequences". New Oxford Book Reviews. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved May 27, 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
