To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante's Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno

Dante published his ambitious & 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 & Baptist preachers, all those New Yorker cartoons, & masterpieces of European art have afforded Dante’s fictional apparition of hell unending attention & credibility. Dinty W. Moore did not buy in.

Moore started questioning religion at a young age, quizzing the nuns in his Catholic school, & has been questioning it ever since. Yet after years of Catholic school, religious guilt, & persistent cultural conditioning, Moore still can’t shake the feelings of inadequacy, & 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 & pokes fun at the over-seriousness of religion in various texts, combining narratives of his everyday life, reflections on his childhood, & religion’s influence on contemporary culture & society. 

Dinty W. Moore is the founder & editor of Brevity & is the director of Ohio University’s BA, MA, & PhD in creative writing programs. He has authored various books of literary nonfiction as well as textbooks & craft guides, most notably Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, & his memoir, Between Panic & Desire, won the GrubStreet National Book Prize. Moore has been published in Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Utne Reader, Salon, Okey-Panky, the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, & the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a frequent speaker & teacher at writers’ conferences.