The Dante Trail trail: E Beeros, Christos
Eh...I might have fudged the Latin a bit. Whatever.
This post wraps up Rod's Italian vacation and our studious following of it as well. A quick synopsis:
Rod likes the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, a lot, for a whole host of reasons, but beer seems to be the one shoving itself into the camera frame. Three of the five pics in his last overseas post were either of or about the beer they brew, and his general takeaway was that the beer helped them bring people to the Church, hence the subtitle of our post.
This could also be a revealing element of Rod's teologia dei suini which we've been unpacking here, namely that, for some souls like Rod, everything that goes in their goozlepipe comes to be regarded as a divine sacrament.
Rod would also like us to know, PAULI, PIK, and DIANE
I told the monks a bit of my story, about how I became Orthodox. There was no sense of judgment or hardness toward me for having left the Catholic Church.
So there.
I graded the beer pics as food pics, bringing our final tote to:
Total pics: 43 - 100%
Selfies: 7 - 16% of total
Things Rod Ate: 12 - 24% of total
Hope someone out there had the winning square. I didn't. I had bet on more selfies, but food took the lead in the final straightaway
Our final Dante Trail trail takeaway: given the preview we've seen on the Dante Trail trail, boy, howdy, will Rod be batting out of his league trying to fuse a figure like Dante into his personal spiritual maelstrom.
There's been no hint so far that his engagement with Dante in Italy has been anything beyond travel guide name- and place-dropping, while the overwhelming focus of the content has been Rod's comestible-obsessed feeling tour of the small part of Italy he could afford to visit.
An honest book about Rod for those for whom he's their spiritual guru? That would sell, to those people. A serious, scholastically researched book about Dante? Well, maybe there's still room for another one, even by an amateur.
But a book where Rod in effect only rubs Dante's head for luck while leading us on a pseudo-Dantean journey through his own personal Hell? This is bait for the publishing Erinyes, fer sure. May they be merciful and not take his eyes.
And with this I'll hand it over to our readers. What sort of Dante-based book about saving Rod's life would you or anyone you know be likely to buy?
