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China center stage on Jesuit’s rare map

21 Feb 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Moses reminds the people in this Sunday’s first reading that before the Lord led them out of Egypt they had “lived there as an alien.” A rarely seen 400-year-old map of the world drawn by another “alien,” Italian missionary Matteo Ricci, S.J., is on display through April at the Library of Congress. In the early 1600s Ricci was among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing. Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of the Chinese emperor. The map places China at the center of the world. The map identifies Florida as “the Land of Flowers.” It includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses, and a region named “Ka-na-ta.” Several Central and South American places are named, including “Wa-ti-ma-la” (Guatemala), “Yu-ho-t’ang” (Yucatan), and “Chih-li” (Chile). Ricci gave a brief description of the discovery of the Americas: “In olden days, nobody had ever known that there were such places as North and South America or Magellanica,” he wrote, using a label that early mapmakers gave to Australia and Antarctica. “But a hundred years ago, Europeans came sailing in their ships to parts of the sea coast, and so discovered them.” The Ricci map gained the nickname the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” because it was so hard to find. It measures 12 feet by 5 feet and is printed on six rolls of rice paper. The Library of Congress rarely exhibits artifacts it does not own because its holdings are so vast, but curators made an exception for the Ricci map. It is being shown publicly for the first time in North America. An article by Brett Zongker for the Associated Press

china maps matteo ricci jesuits library of congress

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Mediterranean food is good for what ails you

03 Mar 2013 - Preaching the News for Sunday

"The Lord is kind and merciful," the psalmist assures us this Sunday, and “heals all your ills.” When it comes to healing diet-related ills, two new studies suggest that cutting sugar intake and increasing the use of olive oil and nuts may be good for what ails you.A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One, published by the Public Library of Science, strongly linked increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rates of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. After accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity. In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: Sugar does.The study demonstrated this link with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. According to Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”At the same time, a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil and nuts beats a low-fat diet hands down in preventing strokes and heart attacks in healthy older people at high risk for cardiovascular disease, according to research released Monday.Spanish researchers found that the consumption of extra-virgin olive oil and nuts “were probably responsible for most of the observed benefits” attained by those in the two study groups on a Mediterranean diet. The findings, released by the New England Journal of Medicine, also add to mounting evidence contradicting a long-held tenet of dieting to improve health: That all calories are equal. Most of the calories in a Mediterranean diet come from fatty fish, fruits, vegetables, and fatty acids and almost none from red meat.The superiority of the Mediterranean diet was substantial: Those who followed one were 30 percent less likely than others to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death attributed to cardiovascular disease during the study. And Mediterranean dieters were almost 40 percent less likely than low-fat dieters to have a stroke during the follow-up period, which lasted nearly five years.Homily hint: Obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular ailments are at nearly epidemic proportions in the U.S. population. Perhaps your faith community could partner with a nearby healthcare institution to provide information on these conditions. Offer the ounce of prevention that could help loved ones avoid the pound of cure. Sources: Articles by Mark Bittman for the New YorkTimes and Melissa Healy for the Los Angeles Times

health calories new england journal of medicine nuts olive oil university of california san francisco rob lustig diabetes sugar public library of science mediterranean food diet stroke heart attack cardiovascular disease

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Vatican sheds digital light on ancient manuscripts

20 Apr 2014 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday’s first reading, Saint Peter describes how God raised Jesus “on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us.” The Vatican’s manuscript archives have operated in a similar fashion, visible only to a few select scholars. All of that is about to change with the digitalization of millions of pages from the pricless manuscripts.Almost 600 years after Pope Nicholas V founded the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Holy See is now turning to 50 experts, five scanners, and a Japanese IT firm to digitize them, opening them to the broader public for the first time.The plan marks a revolution for an institution known as the popes' library, which houses more than 82,000 manuscripts, some dating back to the 2nd century. Scholars must now submit a detailed request to gain access to the library, which sits within the Vatican walls. The most precious works, such as a 1,600-year old manuscript displaying Virgil's poems once studied by Raphael, have been mostly off-limits.By digitizing its archives the Vatican library joins the ranks of illustrious institutions such as the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Cambridge University Library. The Vatican is offering "a service that we provide all mankind," said Msgr. Cesare Pasini, prefect of the library, at a recent presentation of the project.For the past year Vatican officials have worked closely with experts to test special scanners designed to handle particularly delicate documents. Glove-wearing operators, who must remove watches and jewelry to prevent scratching the texts, made sure that the scanners wouldn't damage the documents.After each document is scanned, it will be formatted for long-term storage and then released onto the library's website. The first digital images are expected to be put online in the second half of this year. All of the manuscripts, including the most delicate ones, will eventually be scanned, and viewers will be able to examine them from a variety of angles.Digitalizing the library will be a mammoth task, involving 43 quadrillion bytes (a byte is a unit that is used to represent an alphanumeric character). In the end, about 40 million pages will be available for all to see. The Vatican won't say how long the whole project will take.Homily hint: Bringing digital scanners in contact with ancient, hand-lettered, and illustrated manuscripts says much about how communications has changed in the past 1,000 years. Will the time, focus, and artistry required to create the magnificant manuscripts of centuries past still exist in a age ruled by electronic screens? Source: An article by Liam Moloney for the Wall Street Journal

digitization vatican library manuscripts

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