(blocked) asks:
> Have you read Elaine Pagels book, "The Gnostic Gospels?"

That's an odd perspective since so much of Medeival christianity
ran on money...pilgrims providing a constant stream of money to various
churches and shrines to saints, leading to competitions between
shrines, and (of all things) the "sub-letting" of shrines by taking the
bones of saint A and sending on bone to shrine B, another to shrine C,
and generating money in those regions. And of course the buying of
spiritual favors, patrons, the rich folk sending others to do penance
for them...it was all about money.

(Source: Finucane's MIRACLES AND PILGRIMS, a fascinating book,
btw.)

Interesting aside...for the last 6-8 months, I've been doing a
fair amount of research into medieval England, especially the medieval
church, for a play I'm writing (which may become a novel if I'm not
careful). Dumped several hundred dollars on a massive order from
Amazon.com back a few months ago to fill out what I needed. That was
what tangentially led me into the post-Burn sequence in
"Deconstruction." My brain has been full of monks for the last 8
months or so, and knowing the role they played in maintaining secular
knowledge from about 500 AD and for some time thereafter, that seemed
the perfect route to go that would also resonate with the look of the
Rangers and the religious caste Minbari and the whole feel we were
setting up.

It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I
thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for
several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or
changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of
a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be
supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd
have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK
like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok
moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the
church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they
had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome
probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)

Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was,
since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a
number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science
fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of
Foundation, others.

jms