Dr. Junius Johnson

And I'm Dr. Junius Johnson.

And we're joined today by a really good friend of mine, Dr. Jonathan Jost, who's an associate professor of English at Redeemer University in Canada.

And there he's a specialist in medieval literature, particularly English and French language, vernacular literatures.

And his work...

sits at the boundary between literary studies and theological studies, which is really what you have to do if you're going to do medieval literature, because that's how they thought about it.

I got to know Dr. Joel Speck when we were both students at the Divinity School.

He was my second friend at Divinity School.

And our first year there, we actually took a Dante class together, which was my first time reading through the entire Commedia.

with Peter Hawkins, who is another dear friend and has been an excellent mentor in Dante studies and whatnot.

So we spent a lot of time talking about Dante together, talking about all the medieval things together, talking about Tolkien and Lewis.

And he's a musician.

He's a singer as well.

So Dr. Jost and I go way back, and it's just really exciting to have him here.

So thank you for joining us, Jonathan.

That's exactly right.

It's in a sense, you know, in Inferno, so much of it is about the Virgil Dante relationship.

And it's as if we've kind of made that shift to purgatorio now where so much of the relationships are horizontal and your folks are calling out to one another and encouraging one another along the way and the prayers of the living helping the dead and all of that.

And then, so yeah, I feel like we're definitely on that journey.

And I look forward to the time when we'll be able to reach the Paradiso stage when we'll have renewed in-person fellowship and can go over these things at our leisure.

But we'll borrow a page from that book today and get a little foretaste of what that'll be like.