Chicago–My hometown, the location of my university education at the University of Chicago, one of the world’s premier centers of scientific research. Known as a hub of transportation and commerce, and for the “Chicago Schools” of Sociology, Literary Criticism, Architecture, and especially Economics. After World War II, the home of rival political theorists Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek.

Athens and Jerusalem–Literally, two great cities known as the homes of philosophy and of monotheistic religion, respectively, in the ancient world. Metaphorically, the tension between reason and science on the one hand, and faith and revelation on the other. The metaphor is used extensively in the works of Leo Strauss, a University of Chicago philosopher. (It is believed that Tertullian was the first to mention those two cities together synecdochically as opposing metaphorical types of thought, in a phrase usually rendered, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”)