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Anthony Esolen
Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, having been invited to join the faculty in 2023. He previously taught at Furman University, Providence College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.
Esolen has translated into English Dante's Divine Comedy, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. He is the author of over 30 books and over 1,000 articles in such publications as The Modern Age, The Catholic World Report, Chronicles, for which he serves as a contributing editor, The Claremont Review of Books, The Public Discourse, First Things, Crisis Magazine, The Catholic Thing, and Touchstone, for which he serves as a senior editor. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat, and has written frequently for a host of other online journals. He is a poet in his own right, and his book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold, has been called a Christian poetic masterpiece.
Esolen, a Catholic, writes on a broad field of topics—literature, the arts, and social commentary—and is known as a conservative and a traditionalist scholar. Professor Esolen, who had taught in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College for twenty-seven years, Professor Esolen criticized the concept of "diversity" as the term is commonly used in the modern academy and became the target of a campus protest. The administration's actions in response to this protest influenced his decision to leave Providence College.
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.
Esolen began teaching English at Providence College in 1990, becoming a full professor in 1995. He earned a reputation as a conservative Catholic author, and grew increasingly dissatisfied with the more liberal activist direction of Providence College, a Catholic university run by the Dominican Order. 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." Crisis Magazine wrote the title for the piece, according to Esolen. In the essay, Esolen argued that Western insistence on a modern politically defined idea of diversity as one of its core values was destructive to authentic cultures and was inherently contradictory to the Christian faith. He stated that people can only "be truly at one" when they are united by faith in God. Questioning the very western idea of diversity, he asked:
Is not that same call for diversity, when Catholics are doing the calling, a surrender of the Church to a political movement which is, for all its talk, a push for homogeneity, so that all the world will look not like the many-cultured Church, but rather like the monotone non-culture of western cities that have lost their faith in the transcendent and unifying God?
Esolen held that Catholicism "redeems not only individuals but peoples" preserving their culture as it does so, which is in contrast to "the secular preachers of diversity" who work "their hardest to efface that difference, to muffle all those who speak with the voice of the Church against the vision that those preachers have to offer—a vision that pretends to be 'multicultural,' but that is actually anti-cultural, and is characterized by all the totalitarian impulses to use the massive power of government to bring to heel those who decline to go along." He held that procedures turning over reported bias to a bias response team, was analogous to the infamous Star Chamber. Esolen maintained that supporting identity politics is not possible within Catholicism, since "a disordered inclination" can not be held to be an essential component of any person . Esolen further maintained that by backing the diversity program some faculty had called into question whether "it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?" These faculty members, he said, "have made life hell for more than one of my friends" and some of them "would silence us for good, if they had the power."
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Anthony Esolen
Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, having been invited to join the faculty in 2023. He previously taught at Furman University, Providence College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.
Esolen has translated into English Dante's Divine Comedy, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. He is the author of over 30 books and over 1,000 articles in such publications as The Modern Age, The Catholic World Report, Chronicles, for which he serves as a contributing editor, The Claremont Review of Books, The Public Discourse, First Things, Crisis Magazine, The Catholic Thing, and Touchstone, for which he serves as a senior editor. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat, and has written frequently for a host of other online journals. He is a poet in his own right, and his book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold, has been called a Christian poetic masterpiece.
Esolen, a Catholic, writes on a broad field of topics—literature, the arts, and social commentary—and is known as a conservative and a traditionalist scholar. Professor Esolen, who had taught in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College for twenty-seven years, Professor Esolen criticized the concept of "diversity" as the term is commonly used in the modern academy and became the target of a campus protest. The administration's actions in response to this protest influenced his decision to leave Providence College.
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.
Esolen began teaching English at Providence College in 1990, becoming a full professor in 1995. He earned a reputation as a conservative Catholic author, and grew increasingly dissatisfied with the more liberal activist direction of Providence College, a Catholic university run by the Dominican Order. 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." Crisis Magazine wrote the title for the piece, according to Esolen. In the essay, Esolen argued that Western insistence on a modern politically defined idea of diversity as one of its core values was destructive to authentic cultures and was inherently contradictory to the Christian faith. He stated that people can only "be truly at one" when they are united by faith in God. Questioning the very western idea of diversity, he asked:
Is not that same call for diversity, when Catholics are doing the calling, a surrender of the Church to a political movement which is, for all its talk, a push for homogeneity, so that all the world will look not like the many-cultured Church, but rather like the monotone non-culture of western cities that have lost their faith in the transcendent and unifying God?
Esolen held that Catholicism "redeems not only individuals but peoples" preserving their culture as it does so, which is in contrast to "the secular preachers of diversity" who work "their hardest to efface that difference, to muffle all those who speak with the voice of the Church against the vision that those preachers have to offer—a vision that pretends to be 'multicultural,' but that is actually anti-cultural, and is characterized by all the totalitarian impulses to use the massive power of government to bring to heel those who decline to go along." He held that procedures turning over reported bias to a bias response team, was analogous to the infamous Star Chamber. Esolen maintained that supporting identity politics is not possible within Catholicism, since "a disordered inclination" can not be held to be an essential component of any person . Esolen further maintained that by backing the diversity program some faculty had called into question whether "it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?" These faculty members, he said, "have made life hell for more than one of my friends" and some of them "would silence us for good, if they had the power."