Dawn Axelson > Recent Status Updates

More irritating than Inferno or Purgatorio, but still thought provoking. And he’s still a master of craftsmanship.

Why do atheists feel the need to comment on Dante?

I’m still really glad that I am reading this. Nevertheless, I am grateful for critical thinking skills. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it mixes metaphors like a defective 13th century Cuisinart.

Dorothy L. Sayers quote:
“People who tackle Dante in this… way [by just reading Inferno] seldom get beyond the picturesque squalors of the Inferno. This is as though we were to judge a great city after a few days spent underground among the cellars and sewers; it would not be surprising if we were to report only an impression of sordidness, suffocation, rats, fetor, and gloom.”

It’s been a long time since I have read something so brilliant and so thought provoking. I would have missed the heart of what he was getting at had I not used Great Courses to help guide me. Very humbling, since I consider myself a good reader.

Parts of Inferno were included in the anthology we used in our college’s lit classes. I always wanted to go back&read the whole Commedia, but I never did.
Recently,I was looking at the Great Courses streaming service. The 24 yo series on Dante was now available.
The course is surprisingly good. The teachers are both respectful&knowledgeable. I am getting more out of this work than I could have reasonably hoped.

St. Robert Bellarmine’s feast day is coming, so I am ramping up my reading of his book on the Mass. It’s definitely not light reading but I have legit laughed out loud on a few occasions. I am convinced that he’s secretly the patron saint of the mic drop moments in comment sections.

There’s definitely a reason why so many popular Latin enthusiasts have people start at this graded reader.

If you have ever had a really glitchy computer game, and instead of giving up on it, the difficulty makes you want to see it through all the more, that’s kind of what this book is like.

I’m reading his description of Origen and Tertullian. They were so mighty at one point and then their works became a temptation to poison. So heartbreaking, especially since the preface said that the author fell into the shadow of subscribing to semipelagianism. Good reminder how our categories of good guys and bad guys cannot adequately describe our early Church.

This is a really unique book. It has the Latin on one side and the English translation on the other. I cannot read Latin yet, but I am learning. I take a photo of the Latin text via Microsoft 365 and it will copy the text, so I can put it in LingQ and hover over all of the words I don’t know yet so I can get help translating.

It’s been WAY too long since I have last read this book. Amazing saint, I can better understand why the ICKSP took St. Francis de Sales as their patron.

This is one of my favorite places in one of the most influential of books for me.
A beautiful quote that I want to keep in my notes: “intentions, thoughts, desires, affections, and my whole interior, come let us ascend the mountain, let us go to the place where the Lord sees or is seen. Cares, solicitudes, anxieties, labours, pains, and external duties wait here for my return.” Attributed to St. Bernard

Still a challenging book, but it’s getting more entertaining too.

I wondered why Luther hadn’t shown up in the first hundred or so pages. It’s because his reasoning is so laughably bad that Bellarmine pretty much just quotes and paraphrases him without feeling a need to engage. It would be hilarious if not for the fact that so many souls were lost because of him.

Interesting in some places, rambling sycophantic in others

It’s definitely not what I was expecting from something titled “from an authentic memoir.” It feels like it wants to grab the reader by the lapels and force him to acknowledge what a pious picture he has painted. Everything is breathless. (Continued in next update)

Smart, well researched and translated to be as readable as possible. Kind of a slog, but the last St.Robert Bellarmine book I read started slow and got more interesting as it went along. This one seems to be doing the same thing.

It’s good, but slow going. There’s so much evidence for his case in the early Church Fathers, that St Robert ends up whacking his adversaries’ heads with repetitive evidence that they have no idea what they are talking about.

I had to set the book down when I read the line “In 1534 [Father Martin Luther] published a book on private Mass… in which he was not ashamed to confess that the devil taught and persuaded him that the Mass is the chief abomination…” I already knew that, but to read that millions of Christians would never have the Holy Eucharist because of something so blatantly satanic jabbed into my heart again.

The words certainly work better in spoken form. Still, for something like this, there’s something to be said for book form even if it’s not perfect.

Another great writing from St. Robert Bellarmine.

I think that I might be reading a page or two of Lehodey’s work off and on for the rest of my life.

I enjoyed the first half. I went back to reading after a long break, and now I remember why I had stopped. I usually love the mystical, but this imagery is pretty disturbing. Not sure if it’s on me, or if it is something truly worthy of caution.

I am reading this as research for my fiction writing. What started off as “homework” to put off is genuinely becoming interesting.

It’s a dense, hard read, which I expected. However it is also highbrow funny, which I was not prepared for. One time, after parsing a distinction in Greek, he ended the paragraph with “it is quite the wonder, that none of our adversaries who boast of their expertise in languages happened to notice this.”