Against the Fragments: Radical Works by Brilliant Christians

Inferno

By Dante Alighieri

The first of the 3 canticles in "La divina commedia "(The Divine Comedy), this 14th-century allegorical poem begins Dante's imaginary journey from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise with his sojourn among the damned. There he encounters historical and mythological creatures -- each symbolic of a particular vice or crime. Translated beautifully by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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Purgatorio

By Dante Alighieri

"Purgatorio" is the second installment in Dante's Divine Comedy. It relates in 33 cantos the poet's progress, still with Virgil as his guide, up the mountain of purgatory, where souls must wait to expiate their sins on Earth before they enter heaven.

Grief Observed

By C. S. Lewis

Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

The Seven Storey Mountain

By Thomas Merton

A celebration of Merton's spiritual autobiography is accompanied by an introduction from the editor and a note from Merton's biographer.