Antiquitopia

Coming from the St. Louis area, I always knew that the movie the Exorcist was based upon events that occurred in St. Louis.  Recently, a group of Jesuit scholars at St. Louis University gave a public presentation discussing those events to a packed house.  You can read about it here .

I think I've seen this before, but Paleojudaica just posted on it today. And, being from St. Louis myself, I could not pass letting people know about it--although Jim Davila has far more volume on his blog than I do, perhaps there is a handful of people who read me and not him, like friends and family in St. Louis who can actually take advantage of this offer: HEAVEN ON EARTH A Virtual Tour of Our Holy Temple Wednesdays: July 30, August 6 and 13 7:30 - 9:00 pm This summer, nearly 2,000 years since the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Chabad of Greater St. Louis will unveil Heaven on Earth, a three-week interactive course developed by the renowned Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which recreates the ancient Jerusalem Temples from the ground up. Heaven on Earth will be offered at the Lazaroff Chabad Center, at 8124 Delmar Blvd., in University City, on three consecutive Wednesday evenings, 7:30 to 9 pm, beginning on July 30. Through an interactive and innovative virtual t...

The scholarly community is in mourning as the Vatican Library closes for a THREE-YEAR rebuilding. A Columbia professor of mine who studies medieval Christianity gave me a heads up on this when I was leaving for Rome around the end of May. As Paleojudaica reports, scholars were sitting elbow to elbow with piles of manuscripts trying to finish their research before the inevitable closing. So, what do we do for the next three years? Oddly enough, a little over half of the Vatican's approximately 70,000 original docs are on microfilm at St. Louis University (a good Jesuit school), which will make St. Louis, originally my neck of the woods, of all places the new hub for those needing access to any vatican codex or manuscript for the next three years. Perhaps I will have a research-related reason to go home after all. I have also heard a rumor from a source here in NYC that there are other microfilms of much of the library in Brussels, or some northern European city, but I have not re...