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Clifford has lived across the road for 7 years or so, but has recently started venturing over to see us and try to steal Willow's food.
Catching a quick shot of a balloon gondola flying over me. Telephoto shot sooc from the Pixel 8 Pro.
fineartamerica.com/featured/mustang-spring-sunset-randy-s...
Sunset captured behind my 2014 Ford Mustang on a beautiful spring evening in Waukesha, WI USA.
Oodi is designed to be a living room for the city. The library is essentially built as an "inhabited bridge" whith 2 steel arches spanning over 100 meters. It allows for column-free public spaces.
This corpse, displayed prominently in an ornate glass reliquary in the late 13th century Franciscan Church in Bratislava, is labeled Saint Reparat, who is described as a fourth century deacon martyred near Naples in 353. According to Bratislava tradition he had his tongue and hand cut off by anti-Christian mobs. But this was long after the Edict of Milan, and 353 was a significant year of conflict between Christians (the emperor at the time, Constantius II, sided with the Arian Christians against those who professed the Nicene creed). So if he was a deacon martyred in 353, it would probably have been by other Christians in one of the myriad Christological debates that occurred in late antiquity, before matters of creed were hashed out by theologians and those ruling over the diverse cast of peoples calling themselves Christians, but often holding a wide array of beliefs. But in reality, no ancient source attests to his existence, and the odds are strong that his entire story and identity is a modern invention.
The display and veneration of holy relics (often purported bits of saints' bone, blood, hair, or important objects such as bits of the true cross, nails used in the crucifixion, or the lance used to put Christ out of his misery) is still (somewhat more quietly) practiced by Catholics, but was widespread by the middle ages, and was doubtless adopted by Christians, along with many other things, from pagan practice. Believers saw such morbid objects as a direct connection to the divine, either directly or through a saint whose intercession could bring favor or relief from suffering. Many a medieval king or bishop went into battle confident in the protection afforded him by the possession of such a relic.
These sacred objects also had material value, as the pilgrims who came to visit them might themselves leave offerings to the church that housed the relics and spend their money in the local economy. They were so valued, in fact, that there was a booming trade in a wide range of relics, and this, of course, led to forgeries and the circulation of false relics. There were far too many nails from the true cross, for example, to be credible. Or, in one of the more bizarre medieval examples, several churches claimed to be the keepers of the Holy Foreskin. Or, to take an amusing example from fiction, in Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino the protagonist and his companions pay their way in search of the Kingdom of Prester John by selling duplicate heads of John the Baptist.
The corpse labeled Saint Reparat, alas, presents strong signs of being of a kind with these false relics. In the 16th century the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation ushered in a new era of internal Christian dispute and violence, as Christians warred with, tortured and martyred each other in the name of theology. In a development that seemed providential, the Christian catacombs under Rome were rediscovered and the Catholic church--reeling from the Reformation, which among other criticisms condemned the veneration of saints and relics--declared the discovery miraculous and the scores of thousands of bodies buried there to be those of martyrs. Most had no identifiable marks, and nothing remotely like that number of Christians were martyred in all of antiquity, much less in Rome. The bones were overwhelmingly those of regular people. Nonetheless, their remains would become fodder for the Catholic-Protestant conflict.
Soon, an immense and long-lived industry of corpse mining arose where bones would be taken from the catacombs; assembled into more-or-less complete but often mismatched bodies; assigned saintly identities, biographies and certificates of authenticity by the church; and dressed carefully in expensive clothing for display in glass reliquaries, before being shipped off to churches filled with worshipers eager in troubled times for a tangible connection to the divine. This sale of relics and holy corpses was not legal according to Church law, but this was easily avoided by the substitution of hefty fees for sale prices. A very large number went to Habsburg Central Europe, of which Bratislava (at the time, Pressburg) was then a part. "Saint Reparat," exhumed and translated to Bratislava in 1769, shows all the marks of this tradition/commerce. But despite his dubious provenance, local legend does hold that he has manifested some miracles, which is why students are said to come and pray to him before important exams. Corpse labeled "Saint Reparat," Franciscan Church, Bratislava, Slovakia.