Saturday, December 7, 2013
Vatican, Oxford put old texts online
VATICAN CITY - Access to the Gutenberg Bible and other age-old manuscripts has just gotten easier.
The Vatican Library and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library put the first of 1.5 million pages of their precious manuscripts online Tuesday, bringing their collections to a global audience for the first time.
The two libraries in 2012 announced a four-year project to digitize some of the most important works in their collections of Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and early printed books.
The $3.3 million project is being funded by the Polonsky Foundation.
Among the first works up on the site Tuesday, at bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, are the two-volume Gutenberg Bibles from each of the libraries, an illustrated 11th-century Greek Bible and a beautiful 15th-century German Bible, hand-colored and illustrated by woodcuts.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and is one of the most important research libraries in the world. It has 180,000 manuscripts, 1.6 million books and 150,000 prints, drawings and engravings. The Bodleian is the largest university library in Britain, with more than 11 million printed works.
Pasini said the Vatican was embarking on similar digitization projects with libraries in Azerbaijan and China, among others.
Creche installed at Florida Capitol
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Christmastime manger scenes in public spaces have often been the subject of legal fights in the U.S.
But the American Civil Liberties Union says the creche installed by the Florida Nativity Scene Committee at the Capitol in Tallahassee is legal - because it is privately funded, not government sponsored.
Still, the ACLU says that by allowing the exhibit, which depicts the birth of Jesus, the state will now have to allow anyone to use the premises of the Capitol to express messages.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation plans to put up a banner at Florida’s Capitol stating opposition to religion in government.
Mexican seminary gets extortion calls
MEXICO CITY - It is a distressingly common part of life in modern Mexico: the bullying phone call demanding that the person who answers pay up - or else. Businesses get the extortion calls. Families get them.
And now, apparently, so has the country’s main Roman Catholic seminary.
Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera has announced that a vice rector at the Conciliar Seminary of Mexico received a number of threatening phone calls in late November. The callers, the cardinal said, demanded 60,000 pesos - about $4,500 - “in exchange for respecting the lives of the superiors of that institution,” according to a statement issued by the Archdiocese of Mexico.
“Last week we were meeting in the seminary; they called numerous times, and identified themselves as La Familia Michoacana,” Rivera said, according to the news service Milenio, referring to a drug cartel based in Michoacan state. “But who knows?”
Rivera, according to the archdiocese, instructed the rector of the Mexico City seminary to report the threatening phone calls to officials.
Religion, Pages 12 on 12/07/2013