✣ Highlights from the week online
Saving history from ISIS and the weather An American Benedictine monk is working to preserve ancient Christian and Muslim manuscripts, threatened by wars, theft, weather, and now by ISIS. Matteo Fagotto tells the story of Fr Columba Stewart at theatlantic.com.
“As ISIS militants have destroyed countless artefacts, Stewart has attempted to counter them by working with Christian and Muslim communities in hotspots such as Iraq and Syria. He has trained local teams to photograph centuries-old books with the help of the non-profit organisation he directs ... So far, it has managed to photograph more than 140,000 complete manuscripts, for a total of more than 50,000,000 handwritten pages,” Fagotto claims.
