As we age, most of us ask ourselves, where has the time gone? Borrowing text from UD’s Core curriculum, this spring semester’s Galbraith Lecture will explore the difference between our own perception of time, and how the philosopher-poet Dante Alighieri viewed mankind’s immortal clock, steeped in Scripture and in life.

The university community will gather on Friday, March 23, starting at 6 p.m. in the SB Hall Multipurpose Room, to hear the renowned scholar Anthony Esolen, Ph.D., teaching fellow, writer in residence and professor of English Renaissance at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Esolen, who is lauded in academic circles for his new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, will deliver his lecture, titled “Dante and Liturgical Time.”

“Dante Alighieri is arguably the greatest poet who ever lived,” said Esolen in 2013, lecturing on Catholic Courses. “It’s not easy to say what the Divine Comedy is about because, in fact, it is about everything of the meaning of human life.”

In his translation, Esolen writes: “In general, Dante’s view of time is not ours: Time is not an amoral fourth dimension in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is the moving image of eternity.”

“All times are impregnated with God’s being and his eternal purposes,” he continued. “To know the time is to know one’s relation to the creator of time, and thus to see the end, or purpose, of time as present in the here and now.”

Esolen will use Dante’s masterpiece to explore time beyond simply the hours of our days by analyzing the years of a man’s life to observe the entire history of mankind from the fall of Christ to the Second Coming.

A thought-provoking lecturer and seasoned teacher, as well as an engaged, prolific Catholic writer, Esolen has dedicated his life to the study and teaching of literature, history, and the great ideas and masterworks of Western civilization. He attended Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude, and received both his master’s and doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

With special thanks to the family of Alex T. Galbraith, this lecture is part of the Constantin College Galbraith Lecture Series, which each year brings to campus speakers of academic and professional distinction whose expertise complements the central texts and themes of UD’s Core curriculum.