✣ Highlights from the week online
TS Eliot’s break-up Fr Dwight Longenecker writes at Patheos about TS Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday and the break-up of marriage: “It clearly indicates that with his religious conversion he had also decided to embark on a new life which would be free of Vivienne.” The poet, Fr Longenecker writes, “uses mysterious imagery, complex allusions and abstract symbolism to share in the emotions of exhausted regret and sorrowful penitence. There runs through the poem a sense of sadness mingled with the whisper of a wish for a breath of new life. The lines echo with a new-found innocence combined with the wisdom of experience. There is an air of resignation and fragile hope that ‘these dry bones’ might ‘atone to forgetfulness’ and once more learn to sing.” In praise of Doritos A television advert during the Superbowl final caused controversy after showing an ultrasound of a baby reaching out towards a Doritos crisp the father is munching. When the mother throws the bag across the room the baby shoots out of the womb after them. The National Abortion Rights Action League complained “that the commercial dangerously ‘humanised’ the foetus”. Bishop Robert Barron wrote in the Catholic World Report: “We are tempted to ask, ‘What do you think was gestating in the womb? A monkey? A rabbit?’.” He links this to the medieval philosophy of voluntarism, “the systematic favouring of the will over the intellect” – that God, if he wanted, could make 2+2=5. “As silly as it is to say that 2+2 could be equal to 5, it is just as silly to say that a child in the womb is anything but human. What makes both assertions possible is the claim that will (whether God’s or our own) supposedly trumps intellect, that the sheer desire that something be true can make it true.” Recovering lost words Becky Ferreira writes on Motherboard about the Lazarus Project, which retrieves faded words or erased text from ancient Christian manuscripts. “We would never know about them at all if it weren’t for the emergence of new techniques in imaging science over the last two decades, which can decipher damaged, vandalised, or otherwise unreadable texts with startling precision and accuracy,” she writes. Scholars, scientists and other specialists working on the project “are able to unlock these difficult texts by capturing them over a wide range of wavelengths. In much the same way that an X-ray image of the sky yields a different perspective on the universe than an infra-red image, pseudocolour pictures of text can extract words that have been invisible to the naked eye for centuries.” “This is sort of the ultimate treasure hunt,” one scholar, Dr Roger Easton, tells her. “It is very gratifying to be able to read text that had been feared lost forever.”
