"I come from a clergy background," says Professor MacCulloch. "I've grown up with the Church and my father was a huge enthusiast for history. We talked history – quite naturally – as other families might talk football. And, so, it is a part of my being and the thing which I've always loved doing."

When asked how he and the production team went about beginning to shape this epic series, Professor MacCulloch, who studied history at Cambridge and began his research under famed historian Sir Geoffrey Elton, has a simple answer.

"Well, the most difficult thing is to get the big shapes and the big structures," he says. "And the boring answer is that I've spent my life thinking about those shapes. The thing that any teacher has got to do is provide the big structure so that we don't get bewildered by detail. And you've got to do two things with a very big story. The first thing is that you've got to tell it in the right order. But history is not quite like that – it's not that simple. It's got to have shapes within in it. Right from my very first job, in my early twenties, I got a sense that history needs to be taught in a compelling way, to be taught as stories, to be entertaining. You've got to engage emotions. The past is about the clash of human beings – their emotions, their fears and their joys. And, if you can get that across, then you give people a sense of what the shapes are."

via BBC.

Such a complex story...

It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight - locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant's legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.

The vault in the vast mosque in Baghdad has remained locked for the past three years, keeping the 114 chapters of the Muslim holy book out of sight - and mind - while those who run Iraq have painstakingly processed the other cultural remnants of 30 years of Saddam and the Ba'ath party.

"What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of dollars," said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment fund, standing near the towering minarets of the west Baghdad mosque that Saddam named "the Mother of All Battles". Behind him is the infamous Blood Qur'an, written in Saddam's own blood.

via The Guardian.

From 2 Chronicles 26:

And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that his father Amaziah had done. He set himself to seek God in the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God, and as long as he sought the Lord, God made him prosper.

and...

In Jerusalem he made engines, invented by skillful men, to be on the towers and the corners, to shoot arrows and great stones.

but wait...

And his fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped, till he was strong.  But when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction.

you've got to read the whole chapter.

A thoughtful essay on Newman... Eamon Duffy reviewing John Cornwell's biography.

A remarkably consistent thinker, to the end of his life Newman looked back on his conversion to evangelical Protestantism in 1816 as the saving of his soul. Yet as a fellow of Oriel, the most intellectually prestigious of the Oxford colleges, he outgrew his earlier Calvinism. He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church’s role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism.

Partly as an antidote to his own instinctive skepticism, Newman sought objective religious truth initially in a romanticized version of the Anglican High Church tradition, emphasizing the mystery of God, the beauty and necessity of personal holiness, and the centrality of the Church’s sacraments and teaching for salvation. He was ordained as a priest in 1824, and in 1831 was appointed preacher to the university. Eloquent, learned, widely read, combining a beautiful voice with an unmatched mastery of words, by the early 1830s Newman had acquired a cult following in Oxford. Admiring undergraduates imitated even his eccentricities, like his habit of kneeling down abruptly as if his knees had given way.

The university authorities were alarmed at his growing influence, and changed college mealtimes so that undergraduates had to choose between hearing Newman preach and eating their dinners. In their hundreds, they chose the preaching. This was all the more remarkable since Newman’s message was both uncompromisingly austere and often deliberately provocative, as in his declaration that “it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more suspicious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be.”

via The New York Review of Books.

But by the early 1840s, Newman himself had lost confidence in it. His increasingly subtle attempts to interpret the foundation documents of the Church of England in ways compatible with Roman Catholic teaching provoked a hostile backlash both from the Anglican bishops and from older and more cautious High Churchmen.

Frustrated by the apparently impregnable Protestantism of their contemporaries, one by one Newman’s more headstrong disciples became Roman Catholics. Newman did what he could to stem the leakage, but was himself in an agony of indecision, increasingly convinced that Rome possessed the fullness of truth, yet unable to bring his loyalties and emotions into accord with his intellect. “Paper logic” was merely the trace of deeper and more mysterious movements of heart and mind. As he wrote later, recalling this long slow “death-bed” as an Anglican:

It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? The whole man moves…. Great acts take time. He resigned his university pulpit and retreated to Littlemore, a village outside Oxford where he had built a church. There he and a dwindling band of followers lived a quasi-monastic life of prayer, fasting, and reflection. In October 1845 Newman at last recognized where his own logic had led him, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Both Newman’s attraction to Catholicism and his hesitation in embracing it sprang from a radical historicism. As an Anglican, he had subscribed to the notion that truth was unchanging. Christianity was a revealed religion, its doctrines descended to the present in an unbroken tradition from the Apostles. Nothing could count as Christian truth, unless the primitive Church had believed and taught it. The modern Church of Rome, therefore, could not claim to be the true Church, since so much about it—its elaborate worship, the dominant place of the Virgin Mary in its piety, the overweening authority of the pope—seemed alien or absent from the earliest Christianity: there were no rosary beads in third-century Carthage. Yet Newman’s reading in early Christian sources convinced him that to condemn Rome on these grounds would also be to outlaw much of the rest of mainstream Christianity. The doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, accepted as fundamental by both Catholics and Protestants, were not to be found in their mature form in the early Church. If the central tenets of the faith could develop legitimately beyond their New Testament foundations, why not everything else?

To resolve this apparent contradiction between a religion of objectively revealed truth and the flux of Christian doctrines and practices, Newman wrote at Littlemore a theological masterpiece, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Its central claim is that the concepts and intuitions that shape human history are dynamic, not inert. Great ideas interact with changing times and cultures, retaining their distinctive thrust and direction, yet adapting so as to preserve and develop that energy in different circumstances. Truth is a plant, evolving from a seed into the mature tree, not a baton passed unchanging from hand to hand. Ideas must unfold in the historical process before we can appropriate all that they contain. So beliefs evolve, but they do so to preserve their essence in the flux of history: they change, that is, in order to remain the same. “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

via Facebook.

Ricky Gervais on how he stopped believing:

I used to believe in God. The Christian one that is.

I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him.

One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.

I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing on the cross.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God -– what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God- ‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God- ‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

via WSJ.

In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search. That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell’s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution.

Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky.

In late November, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that the case could go forward, and a trial is scheduled for February. The case represents a rare example, experts say, of a lawsuit by a scientist who alleges academic persecution for his religious faith.

Both sides agree that Dr. Gaskell, 57, was invited to the university, in Lexington, for a job interview. In his lawsuit, he says that at the end of the interview, Michael Cavagnero, the chairman of the physics and astronomy department, asked about his religious beliefs.

“Cavagnero stated that he had personally researched Gaskell’s religious beliefs,” the lawsuit says. According to Dr. Gaskell, the chairman said Dr. Gaskell’s religious beliefs and his “expression of them would be a matter of concern” to the dean.

Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, so interviewers typically do not ask about an applicant’s faith. Depositions and e-mails submitted as evidence suggest why Dr. Cavagnero may have raised the issue with Dr. Gaskell.

For the plaintiff, the smoking gun is an e-mail dated Sept. 21, 2007, from a department staff member, Sally A. Shafer, to Dr. Cavagnero and another colleague. Ms. Shafer wrote that she did an Internet search on Dr. Gaskell and found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy.

“Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical. If we hire him, we should expect similar content to be posted on or directly linked from the department Web site.”

via NYTimes.com.