Foucault and Christianity – a really interesting online resource from Niki Kasumi Clements, as part of the research for her book Foucault the Confessor.

As part of my research on Michel Foucault’s engagement with early Christian texts, I have been tracing his citational practices from 1974-1984 through his published works; gradually I will include citations from Foucault’s meticulous notes in his archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The 2018 posthumous publication, L’Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les aveux de la chair, edited by Frédéric Gros, is included; the 2021 translation by Robert Hurley, Confessions of the Flesh, contributes to the need to understand Foucault’s complex navigation of Christian texts and practices.

Currently processing the textual references Foucault makes to mainly early Christian texts in his monographs and Collège de France lectures between 1974 and 1984, the following dynamic data visualizations were built in Python by the Center for Research Computing at Rice University. Foucault’s works are on the left, leading to (mostly) ancient Christian authors in the middle, leading to cited works of those authors on the right. The number of connections across years and the density of citations are both important.

See also this tweet and the followup thread explaining the project and its uses.