Anthony Esolen

Esolen is of Italian ancestry. He was born in Archbald, Pennsylvania. Anthony Esolen graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1981. He pursued graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his M.A. in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature in 1987. Esolen's dissertation, "A Rhetoric of Spenserian Irony," was directed by S.K. Heninger. ==Providence College==

Esolen began teaching English at Providence College in 1990, becoming a full professor in 1995. 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.'" In September 2016, Crisis Magazine published an article by Esolen titled "My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult." 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." ==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." On May 13, 2019, Esolen resigned from Thomas More due to a serious health problem. 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. ==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. 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. In his translations, Esolen chose not to attempt a "preservation of Dante's rhyme in any systematic form." 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." 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. ==Publications==

Translations The following works were translated into English by Esolen: Books The following books were written by Esolen: • Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity. May 28, 2014. • Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching. Sophia Institute Press. October 20, 2014. • Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child. Intercollegiate Studies Institute May 18, 2015. • Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church. TAN Books December 7, 2016. • • • • Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World. TAN Books March 25, 2019 • • In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. Angelico Press, 2021. • Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind. Ignatius Press. 2020. • No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. Regnery Publishing. 2022. • The Lies of Our Time. Sophia Institute Press. 2023. == References ==