I suppose it’s unseemly to say so, but I’m indifferent to Notre Dame. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had once been there, but it’s more likely that if I had I would have felt irritated at the ostentatious wealth produced by a gaudy fraud.<\/p>\n
A few things you are unlikely to learn from the news coverage.<\/p>\n
As originally built, the high cathedral walls were profoundly unstable. The famous flying buttresses were a later addition, something I learned in a structures course as a civil engineering undergrad. Modern structural design incorporates shear-walls to overcome the problem, eliminating the need for exterior buttresses.<\/p>\n
The Catholic Church pioneered modern distributed management. Have you ever wondered what is the difference between a cathedral and a church? Cathedrals served as “regional headquarters” and are headed by a higher-ranking Holy Man. Each cathedral, in turn, has “satellites” (local churches) whose staff are answerable to the big-shot who heads the cathedral.<\/p>\n
The British author Ken Follett has written a wonderful novel about the politics, and architecture and engineering, of a medieval cathedral, The Pillars of the Earth<\/a><\/i>. It’s a great yarn with a lot of detail, and well worth having in hand next trip to the beach.<\/p>\n It’s unlikely that Notre Dame, or any other of the hundreds of churches claiming crucifixion relics, actually possess relics of the crucifixion. Jesus was regarded as a common criminal by most Romans, and had a very small set of fans; it’s unlikely that those few fans rolled away barrels of souvenirs from the crucifixion, anticipating the day that every village church would aspire to boost its income by displaying a gen-u-ine splinter from the cross, or thorn from the crown, or knuckle from the thumb of some dead saint.<\/ul>\n France has committed to rebuilding the cathedral, which is their business and allright with me; tourism supports a lot of jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I suppose it’s unseemly to say so, but I’m indifferent to Notre Dame. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had once been there, but it’s more likely that if I had I would have felt irritated at the ostentatious … Continue reading