Cathedral

Lausanne boasts a beautiful cathedral with much of the original facades and stained-glass windows intact (in contrast to the Notre Dame in Paris), for centuries, anchoring the city as a "go to" destination, before the bureaucratic organs of the global state - UN, UNICEF, etc - made Geneva the political centerpiece.

The last tower in Europe to feature a crier who climbs nightly from 10pm to 2am, proclaiming, "All is well..."

Rue Pierre Viret is a street circling the cathedral base

named after the reformer whose 500th birthday is being commemorated now (Calvin last year). Viret was based in Lausanne, forming a Protestant academy, and - in his day - was published and read second only to Calvin; largely overlooked as none of his works are available in English, but the Viret society is busily working to correct this.

Reformation Wall (Geneva); Latin for Jesus below

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You may know that TIME magazine named the "new" Calvinism "one of the ideas changing the world right now", undoubtedly owing to the influence of young, restless, & reformed, such as Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church fame. The movement is not without controversy, but seems more-or-less healthy, while a testimony to the new technologies that have spawned and authorized a new set of figures - a virtual eldership, if you will - adding pizazz and outreach, while pulling resources from existing churches; ie the Amazon.com version of "doing" church, the DrudgeReport way of doing news, and, as former senator Anthony Wiener discovered, a Twitter way of doing scandal.

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Back to church. A Catholic cathedral turned Protestant, the site of the famed Disputation where Calvin critiqued the official church teaching, there is an aesthetic stoicism centering the service from iconography to teaching. One of the most expensive instruments in the world ($4.2 million),

this magnificent pipe organ was made in Massachusetts and is the first European cathedral with a Made in the USA label! I am committed to not leaving CH without having the family attend an organ concert, which, like rock concerts, the heavy bass reverberates through the body of the listener. I, like many, have been turned off by the mortuary-style, wall-to-wall carpet organ music; a stone church setting was an acoustic revelation.

The front entrance features a famous rendering (in medieval European art) of Moses whose head is studded with horns, commonly ascribed as an error in translation from Hebrew to Latin when the word for "light" was rendered as "horn."

Could be. But I am far more intrigued by the possibility that light and horn are cleverly punned to register multiple meanings of godly radiance with legal justice & power, as in Christ the lamb with 7 horns in Revelations. Horn as symbol for legal, kingly power - Solomon's ivory throne - evoking blood and righteous sacrifice (eg Lady Justice and her sword). See Michael Bull.

Back to Viret. I got excited to see one of the many exhibition placards stating that singing was one of the liberal arts featured in the academy, confirming Christopher Page's thesis in the book below.