I’ve been thinking a lot about transcendence in sports and politics — two fields in which the quantitative and the qualitative collide.
Read MoreEugène Thirion’s “Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices” (1876, oil on canvas). Joan heeded the voices of St. Michael the Archangel, pictured with her here, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret to rally the French against the British during the Hundred Years’ War of the Late Middle Ages. Burned as a heretic in 1431, she was canonized in 1920 and is revered today by the French, the Roman Catholic Church and feminists alike as a woman who remained true to her beliefs.