Rethink.

1. New friends: mosaic artist Julie Richey not only does some amaz­ing work, but is even blog­ging about the Col­legium Rome trip I’m still on. Cherie Peacock’s (who’s on the trip) Catholic Answers site explains the piety of many on the trip, even though she’s not blog­ging about this pub­licly (or at least, not that I know).

2. The University’s Rome cam­pus needs more books and com­put­ers. The for­mer are nec­es­sary because teach­ing here, if I were so priv­i­leged, would be a night­mare with­out them: I would con­stantly say “hey, you should look at such and such a sec­ondary source” and it wouldn’t be there. Specif­i­cally, they need books by UD pro­fes­sors and by teach­ers of UD professors.

Also — there are a grand total of 2 com­puter ter­mi­nals on cam­pus. Think about that for a sec­ond, if you don’t quite see a problem.

3. We were in Siena, Flo­rence and Assisi recently — more on all of that later, but for now, I want to take note of the mon­u­ment to Machi­avelli in Santa Croce in Flo­rence. The woman depicted holds his por­trait atop books in her right hand. Her left grips scales lying slack (h/t Sean Lewis), with a sword in one scale (the blade is hid­den) and a scroll in the other. She has not weighed both or either yet, and one won­ders how that judg­ment resolved in writ­ings unam­biva­lent about unleash­ing power for peace.

• And Next Week…
• Recon­sid­er­ing School
• Still Autumn.
• All Over the Place
• At the Uni­ver­sity of Dal­las, 3/28/10

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