In this conversation with Dr. Clint Brand, we explore what we can learn about liberal learning from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Taking Scott Crider’s recent essay on Dante as our point of departure, we explore how we might read the Commedia as “a series of pedagogical encounters.”  What can we discover about the roles of humility, wonder, love, the soul, dialectic, piety, poetry, and “submission to the real” in the growth of metamorphosis of liberal learning?  What lessons from Dante might we as teachers take into our own classrooms?

Links of potential interest:

Scott Crider’s “Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education” at Public Discourse

Dante’s Commedia (Paradiso)

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

C. S. “Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man

Plato’s Seventh Letter

Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities

Jean Leclercq O.S.B, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Clint Brand, ed., St. Gregory’s Prayer Book