‘How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem’ by Rod Dreher

This book demonstrates a wonderful thing in reading: how the right book can fall into your hands at the right time.

Rod Dreher is the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, which I read not long ago. It was a sweet tribute to his sister who sadly died of cancer at an early age. Writing that book coincided with a return to his hometown, but that was not to be a happy ending to the story. Dresser spiralled into a depression that caused him to be completely out of sync with his family, his faith, and his health. Help came from an unexpected source: Dante’s Inferno. It was ‘divine timing’ with the Divine Comedy.

In a highly readable memoir, Dreher describes his journey back to health and restored relationship, especially with his father, in this companion volume to Ruthie Leming. If you have read one, you really ought to read the other.

No better words can describe the perspective in this book than with this quote from the author himself:
“This book is for believers who struggle to hold on to their faith when religious institutions have lost credibility. It’s a book for people who have lost faith in love, in other people, in the family, in politics, in their careers, and in the possibility of worldly success. Dante has been there too. He gets it. This is a book about sin, but not sin in the clichéd, pop-culture sense of rule breaking and naughtiness. In Dante, sin is the kind of thing that keeps us from flourishing and living up  to our fullest potential, and it’s also the kind of thing that savages marriages, turns neighbor against neighbor, destroys families, and ruins lives. And sin is not, at heart, a violation of a legalistic code, but rather a distortion of love. In Dante, sinners–and we are all sinners–are those who love the wrong things, or who love the right things in the wrong way. I had never thought about sin like that. This concept unlocked the door to a prison in which I had been living all my life. The cell opened from the inside, but I had not been able to see it.”