Full Description
Dante published his ambitious and unusual poem, Divine Comedy, more than seven hundred years ago. In the ensuing centuries countless retellings, innumerable adaptations, tens of thousands of fiery sermons from Catholic bishops and Baptist preachers, all those New Yorker cartoons, and masterpieces of European art have afforded Dante's fictional apparition of hell unending attention and credibility. Dinty W. Moore did not buy in.
Moore started questioning religion at a young age, quizzing the nuns in his Catholic school, and has been questioning it ever since. Yet after years of Catholic school, religious guilt, and persistent cultural conditioning, Moore still can't shake the feelings of inadequacy, and asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing a myth that merely makes us miserable? In To Hell with It, Moore reflects on and pokes fun at the over-seriousness of religion in various texts, combining narratives of his everyday life, reflections on his childhood, and religion's influence on contemporary culture and society.
Contents
Author's Note
Prologue: The Hole
1. Cantos I-III: Dinty's Inferno
2. Canto IV: Pudgy, Smiley, Jughead, and Fritz
3. Canto V: The Burning Bush
4. Canto VI: Gobbets of Chicken
5. Canto VII: Some Precious Blood, a Speck of Bone
6. Canto VIII: Into the Pickling Swill
7. Cantos IX-XI: The Little Heretic's New Baltimore Catechism
8. Cantos XII-XVII: The Hell Hole
9. Cantos XVIII-XXX: Bring on the Ass Trumpets
10. Cantos XXXI-XXXIV: Beyond Goode and Evil
Epilogue: My Paradiso (With Basil and Tomato Cream)
Acknowledgments
Index
