Intermezzo

I hope to blog some remarks abouty Prof. Tufte’s Visual Explanations before class on Thursday, but in the meantime I’ve been reminded of how little time remains unto those of us who’re pursuing this course in the confines of an academic term. I consulted Beth and Kristin, and we’ve decided to read Tufte this week, some smatterings of Irigaray (“Divine Women” and “Women, the Sacred, and Money” from Sexes and Genealogies) and Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations) next week; Graham Hughes’s Worship As Meaning the week after; and The Sparrow and The Children of God by Mary Doria Russell (which books I don’t know, but which both Kristin and Beth assure me pertain to our course’s intersts) in the last week.

Since we can squeeze in so little else, I’m giving Beth and Kristin photocopies of various articles. One of my favorites is Terry Castle’s article “Contagious Folly: 'An Adventure' and Its Skeptics” from Critical Inquiry 17, reprinted in Questions of Evidence,” about the friends who traveled back in time to encounter Marie Antoiette at Versailles. I’ll give them copies of Mark Cousins’s essay on “The practice of historical investigation” from Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, and will point them to this essay by John Dixon, that summarizes John Fleming’s book, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis .