Topic: Dante’s Purgatorio

Leader: Dr. Jason Baxter, Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Humanities at Wyoming Catholic College

Dr. Baxter has been with WCC for eleven years. His primary research interests include medieval and Renaissance ideas of beauty, the long-lived legacy of the thought of Plato, the poetry of Dante. He is also interested in medieval mysticism, humanism, the relationship between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and, increasingly, the relationship between science and the arts (you can read more about that on his personal website, JasonMBaxter.com).

His scholarly publications include articles on the Platonic tradition in the Latin West, and writings on Dante. Dr. Baxter worked with Wyoming Catholic College’s Distance Learning Program to produce a free, eighteen-part introduction to the Comedy: “Dante in the Year of Mercy.” His A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which focuses on the spiritual meaning of Dante’s poetics, is available from Baker Academic. He has also published Falling Inward: Humanities in the Age of Technology, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life. He has made multiple media appearances, and frequently writes and speaks on his own experiences in travel, the relevance of the liberal arts, the relationship between humanistic studies and technology, and topics on Dante, for both popular and scholarly audiences.

His monograph, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante’s Encyclopedia and the Names of God (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2020), explores the spiritual meaning of the Comedy’s famous “encyclopedism.” He recently published The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis (IVP, 2022). He is currently working on a new translation of the Comedy and a trade book tentatively entitled, What Were Humans?