Father Paul Pearson converted to Catholicism during his university days, entered the Toronto Oratory in 1985, was ordained to the priesthood in 1989, and began serving as Dean of Saint Philip's, the seminary run by the Oratorians in 1990. That same year, in response to requests from seminarians, he began to offer seminars on Dante's Inferno. This volume and two forthcoming ones on the spiritual aspects of the Purgatorio and Paradiso have been written so that a wider audience may benefit from "spiritual direction from Dante."