Note: this group began in fall 2025, and its conclusion will run from Jan. to Feb. 2026. While newcomers are welcome at any time, most readers will find it more useful to wait and join us in late Feb. or early March when a new literary group begins -- probably restarting the cycle with Dante’s Inferno. Please contact us if you are interested!
Modern readers sometimes fear that a medieval portrayal of heaven will involve ghostly souls flitting around with harps trying to convince themselves that they are not bored. Dante had other ideas. The magnificent third part of his Comedy is justly famous for its wildly inventive use of language, its endlessly imaginative account of travel to all the planets known in Dante's time (and the stars and “spheres” beyond), and above all for the depth of its thought about human life in a universe suffused with the divine. Far from an exercise in vapid piety, the Paradiso actually intensifies the withering attacks of Inferno and Purgatorio on the misdeeds of the contemporary church -- while simultaneously putting forward a deeply rooted and deeply serious “itinerary” for a mind’s journey into God.
Join us! We are reading the poem at a slow and thoughtful pace (about 6-7 pages each week). Our discussions will be guided by a recognized scholar of Dante who’s led groups on this journey through outer space nearly every year since 2013. And we’ll work together toward forming a small community of readers whose different backgrounds and interests deepen our common understanding of one of the greatest spiritual books Western culture has ever produced.
Twelve weekly sessions beginning week of September 15. Meeting times TBD, so please contact us ASAP to express your preferences!
If you are interested in discovering how the Christian church has related to scripture since its beginning, and in exploring what happens when those traditional ways of reading, study, and prayer meet the newer approaches that have arisen in the last few centuries, this group is for you! We are reading some of the most thoughtful and influential writings on the Bible that Christianity has produced, weighing the often surprising ideas of “church fathers” and other important writers on questions like:
* What, if anything, does one need to know in advance in order to read the Bible well?
* When should scripture be read “literally” or “historically,” and when is it better to find in it an “allegorical” meaning? Can a single passage have more than one meaning?
* What should be taken into account in determining a passage’s
meaning or meanings? The intention of the (human) author? Previous knowledge about God? About the world? The intention of the reader? (Various church fathers proposed all of these!)
* What does it mean to say that the Bible is “true,” or, to use a later word, “inerrant”? Must “inerrancy” mean that every fact narrated in scripture happened exactly as described? If not, what other kinds of truth exist, and how do we tell which passages have which kind?
This spring we’ll begin with famous medieval “exegetes” like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and probably Nicholas of Lyra, then turn to the 17th-century birth of modern “historical-critical” methods and the process by which most branches of Christianity have moved from an initial rejection to a cautious dependence on those methods (e.g. in the 1943 Catholic encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu). We’ll leave time at the end for movements like “postliberalism” or “narrative theology” that try to combine old and new by drawing simultaneously on recent attempts to analyze what we do when we interpret texts and on the church’s traditional affirmation that some texts are “inspired” in a special way.
Join us! This segment begins in late Feb. or early March and runs to June. Here too the meeting times are TBD, so contact us to express a preference!
TheTreasures.org hosts online reading groups designed to provide access to texts that are endlessly engaging, thought-provoking, possibly life-transforming — and typically texts that few people would work their way through on their own.
When one no longer has to work on one’s own, what once seemed a daunting task changes into a joyful experience, a highlight of the week: discovering that a “classic” like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is not a far-off block of impenetrable literary marble, but a living, changing artwork that has vital things to say to us, and perhaps to do to us, in our twenty-first-century lives.