Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, having been invited to join the faculty in 2023.
Esolen has translated into English Dante's Divine Comedy, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
In the essay, Esolen argued that Western insistence on a modern politically defined idea of diversity as one of its core values was destructive to authentic cultures and was inherently contradictory to the Christian faith.
[14]Esolen held that Catholicism "redeems not only individuals but peoples" preserving their culture as it does so, which is in contrast to "the secular preachers of diversity" who work "their hardest to efface that difference, to muffle all those who speak with the voice of the Church against the vision that those preachers have to offer—a vision that pretends to be 'multicultural,' but that is actually anti-cultural, and is characterized by all the totalitarian impulses to use the massive power of government to bring to heel those who decline to go along.
Some wrote a petition in which they charged that Esolen's writings contained repeated "racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic and religiously chauvinist statements.
He argued that students and faculty members who disagree with him "should respond in the currency of academic discourse—reasons, evidence, arguments—not by attempting to isolate, stigmatize, and marginalize him for stating dissenting opinions.
"[16] On May 4, 2017, it was announced that Esolen would join the faculty at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire beginning the fall of 2017.
"[7] In an essay praising his relationships at his new job, he said working at Providence was like "trying to shore up a crumbling wall" where the leadership was striving to "pass out lemonade to the professors with the sledge hammers.
[21] Esolen's verse translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy into English was published by Random House Modern Library.
"[8] In lieu of Dante's famous terza rima, Esolen's translation is written in the preferred meter of such English poets as Shakespeare and Tennyson, blank verse.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a professor emerita of English at the City University of New York, praised the translation for being "not only highly readable, but also vigorous and beautiful.
He cited the establishment of universities, the development of the carnival, and the contributions of famous saints such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to science and philosophy, all of which took place in the Middle Ages, as examples.
Esolen cited the NAB translations for "[p]refer[ing] the general to the specific, the abstract to the concrete, the vague to the exact."