(click photos to enlarge)
George and Laurene took us for a day trip to the nearby town of Carcasonne, whose name was familiar to me only because of the board game. Little did I know that this medieval walled town figured heavily in the Albigensian Heresy, a chapter in the history of the Roman Catholic Church that I’d vaguely heard of but knew much more about by the end of this trip. Our hosts turned us on to Stephen O’Shea’s excellent popular history The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars. (Google “Cathars” or “Albigensian Crusade.” It’s a horrifying story of Christians persecuting other Christians to match any Sunni/Shiite conflict we know about today.)
When we walked into the cathedral, an a cappella quartet (the Doros Choir of Moscow) was performing sacred music in close to ideal acoustics:
another eye opens 
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