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, later 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
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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.
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