This week, we’ll have what may be the last opportunity in our lifetimes to experience the intersection of Good Friday and the feast of the Annunciation. We invite you to read Kevin Birth’s thoughtful exploration of this calendrical coincidence below, and to consider meditating on John Donne’s poetic exploration of the same coincidence tomorrow, on Good Friday itself. This post came about as a result of a conversation between Andy Walsh, author of ESN’s Science Corner, and Kevin Birth. See previous posts here, here, and here. Kevin is an anthropologist who studies cultural concepts of time, and has published several articles on the use of calendars to create meaning, including the articles “Calendars: Representational Homogeneity and Heterogenous Temporality†(Time and Society, 2011), “Signs and Wonders: The Uncanny Verum and the Anthropological Illusion†in Echoes of the Tambaran, and chapter 3 of his book Objects of Time.
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