So there's this new toy out on Google that everyone 's talking about that allows you to track the occurrence of words and phrases in some millions of books published over the past 508 years. Clearly, this is the engine we've been waiting for to answer the mysteries of the universe. Or, at the very least, history. For example, I have to write a paper on spiritual exercises for a conference coming up in January and I'm wondering when "spiritual exercises" actually became popular as a way of describing methods of contemplation and/or devotion. So I searched on the phrase, and voilà: A clear peak in the seventeenth century, just as you would expect with all those Jesuits running around, with a precipitous drop-off after 1700. But we are going to be talking about spiritual exercises as something that concerns people now as well, not just historically. What do with do with the fact that there are so many fewer references to spiritual exercises in the modern per...
