Yesterday I discussed an incident from my teen years when a neighbor lady (NL) interrupted my effort to provide an impromptu exegesis of Dante's Divine Comedy. Today I'll see if I can finish that exegesis. Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... That's when I was interrupted. I'm not sure where I would have gone from there, or how effectively, at 14: but here is my effort to finish the thought more than 40 years later. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take on the power struggle. His take, roughly, was that the Church should renounce any claim to temporal power and be a more purely spiritual organization. It could do this by making clear its subservience to the Holy Roman Emperors in temporal matters. On a related point, Dante was not happy with the behavior of the Italian city-state...