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The Dante Society is our group for graduate students and anybody beyond college interested in fostering the Christian intellectual life in Pittsburgh.

This year marks the 750th anniversary of Dante's first encounter with the flesh and blood Beatrice who would become la donna gloriosa of Dante's mind. In the chivalric mode, Dante fell in love with Beatrice at the age of nine, and throughout his life and career, he would revisit the importance of this encounter. Beatrice dies at a young age, and Dante makes her his guide through Paradise in his masterwork, The Divine Comedy. Of course, Beatrice's role in The Divine Comedy inspires our own Beatrice Institute.

To commemorate this anniversary, we are reading the entirety of The Divine Comedy in a year. The goal is to take a slow, ruminating walkthrough of this text — often hailed as the greatest work of imagination in the Western world — and to come to terms with Dante's grand synthesis of the cosmos and the human heart. Reading only six cantos every two weeks, we will aim to finish Inferno and half of Purgatorio this semester and the other half of Purgatorio and Paradiso in the Fall Semester.

We will meet every 1st and 3rd Thursday at 4 pm on Zoom. RSVP here.

Date: Thursday, April 4th

Time: 4:00 - 5:00 pm EST