[Posted by a Third Party per Request] Jane is still without power. Current promise from the power company is Midnight Sunday, so expect no post prior to that, if then.

So, the title obviously indicates that I’m not getting back to the defense again today, but that’s because, after a rather miserable week, I’ve got the week end. And there are some good things about the weekend.  There’s a nearly three day Murder, She Wrote marathon on one of the Lifetime channels, which  means I…

Sometimes I think that the greatest bar to understanding is that we all think that we know what everything means. I have no idea if that sentence made any real sense. I do know what I’m trying to say, however, so maybe I’ll make it work better if I go at it that way. We…

Okay. Back on track. With everything. Really. A long way back there, I said that it was possible to look over the course of history and see where the provision of a liberal arts education where none had been before–or a very weak version of which had been before–was followed by an overall improvement of…

Okay, okay. I will get back to The Defense (Part 13?) in a day or two. All I can say in my own defense–and it’s not much of a defense–is that dealing with the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation is the thing that makes me most nervous about that entire exposition.  It’s the part I’m…

So, it’s about five o’clock in the morning.  I got home last night after ten, got to bed around midnight and got up this morning at 4:30.  The 4:30 isn’t unusual, but it’s Friday, and that means I have to teach an eight o’clock.  You can ask me how I got into this crazy schedule,…

Hi.  This has nothing to do with anything, except that I’m sitting here proctoring a final exam in a night class.  And I like his class.  They’re adults.  They’re serious. This afternoon wasn’t so wonderful.  In two classes, one for upperclassmen, nobody–and I mean nobody–knew who Gadhaffi was.  I just don’t know if that’s how…

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, it was a snarky one. But I’ll stick by my account, because it’s accurate, and the Albigensian Heresy is evidence of that accuracy. I never said that the Roman Catholic Church did not punish heretics before the Counterreformation, I said that the Counterreformation was the period of the great Inquisitions,…

Every time I start talking about these things, I get to this place and find myself stymied. We are all taught, in schools–or used to be taught–a great deal about the Renaissance and something about the Middle Ages.  A lot of what we’re taught is wrong, but we at least get the idea that there…

This week end is not going to be as productive as others have been, because I’ve got things to do and not a lot of time to blog. But it occurred to me yesterday that I know of something that might help to illustrate the decadence of the Renaissance and the way in which the…