Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count.

With Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird, Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Music Welcome to the Mordification of Spin.

Today we want to discuss the events surrounding a friend of this program. Tony Esselen, who's professor at Providence College in Rhode Island and has recently found himself at the center of a storm.

Tony will be known to many of you as a man who's written a couple of excellent books on how to bring up children.

He's also translated Dante's Divine Comedy into English with, I think, some of the greatest

notes, most helpful notes, if you want to read that poem in its entirety.

But he's also been a very outspoken critic of the contemporary culture of political correctness and the

stifling of debate in the name of a rather conformist view of diversity.

Recently, Tony wrote a couple of articles for the Catholic magazine Crisis, which describes

itself as a voice for the Catholic laity.

One of them, September 26, was entitled, My College succumbed to the totalitarian diversity cult.

And the second one, October the 20th, was, what will you do when the persecution comes?

In the first, he criticizes the growing

conformity and the growing closing down of free speech, even on faith-based campuses. And in the

second, he really issues a clarion call for Catholics to be Catholics, to act and behave consistently with their faith.

Now, obviously, mortification of spin, this is not a Roman Catholic program at all.

We are confessional Protestants.

But many of the principles that Tony articulates, and many of the issues that he's facing,

are going to be issues that Christians

across the confessional spectrum face in the next five or ten, 15 years. So we wanted to spend

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