Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor at Thales College and the author or translator of 28 books, on literature, culture, and the Christian faith, among them the three-volume Modern Library translation of The Divine Comedy, and, most recently, In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John (Angelico Press). He and his wife Debra also produce a web magazine, Word and Song, dedicated to a revival of interest in the good, the true, and the beautiful, through traditional hymns, poetry, classic films, popular music from its golden age, and the quirky history of the English language.

Recent Essays

The College Diploma Shakedown

The aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can afford the usurious colleges, and by doing so, to empower families that are richer in brains and in common moral virtues than in money or power.

Little League, Then and Now

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t enter into the picture. A child’s life was not packaged up and dressed for ambition. That meant, too, that the fans did not take things too seriously.

Stepford, A Parable of Freedom

In Stepford, everyone has forgotten how to do nothing, as children used to do: the blessed nothing that is full of receptivity and calm, and that is at the heart of the merry activity of play.

A Recipe for a Festival

They know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a careful genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating source.

The New House, The New Life

I fear that neither liberals nor most self-styled conservatives want to reexamine the habits, both economic and sexual, that have impoverished the working class, set the middle class on the wheels of a machine that literally sends their extra income up the chimney, and eviscerated neighborhood life.

The Borough Playground

It’s children that make the neighborhood, and when children are outdoors, you’ll want porches in the front of your houses, so that you can see the streets where they often play, as we did.

The Polls of Nowhere

Nowhere, America Today, the subjects of the Assimilated Provinces of Megalomerica will go to the polls to vote. It's mostly a formality, since the polls...

News from Nowhere

Providence, RI There are in these recent days at least three matters of great importance confronting my beloved land, The Assimilated Provinces of Megalomerica. They...

Something Better than a Giant

This Christmas my daughter bought for me a CD of Welsh hymns, folk songs, and patriotic anthems, sung by the burly baritone Bryn Terfel....

There’s Equality, and There’s Equality

In one of my favorite movies, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a family of coal miners is faced with the prospect of...

A Message in a Bottle

Every now and then we hear of a lucky homeowner who takes down a wall to make renovations on his house, and finds inside...

Life Under Compulsion: The Minotaur

When we lose the sense of transcendence, when in our hearts and minds the things of time are no longer oriented toward eternity, then,...