University of Saskatchewan: Medieval monks’ moon-watching sheds light on volcanoes and climate change. “An international research team including the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has used meticulous medieval-era records scribed by monks about the colour of lunar eclipses to develop a new, deeper understanding of volcanoes and climate change.”
PSU Vanguard: The monks behind the books. “If you’ve ever walked the stacks of Portland State’s Branford Price Miller Library, you’ve likely noticed the distinctive hard-cloth bindings on a number of books on the shelves. From academic journals to dissertations, many of the library’s specialty bookbinding needs are performed by a community of Trappist monks from the Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Oregon.”
Washington Post: Monks in New Mexico desert dedicated to hospitality reflect on two years without guests. “For more than 50 years, a small community of Benedictine monks has quietly lived, worked and worshiped here in a cluster of off-grid adobe buildings along the banks of northern New Mexico’s Chama River. Considered the most remote Catholic monastery in the hemisphere, it can be reached only by a 13-mile single-lane earthen road that winds through the canyon. Abiquiú, the closest village — population 151 — is 25 miles away. Groves of cottonwood and willows line the river where bald eagles hunt for rainbow trout. Black bears, coyotes and cougars prowl the pinyon- and sage-scented Santa Fe National Forest, which surrounds the monastery. Despite the difficult journey, outsiders have flocked to this serene abbey for decades in search of spiritual renewal.”
Coda Story: Cambodia’s Internet crackdown reaches its activist monks. “The sexually explicit photos were plastered over Venerable Luon Sovath’s Facebook page, with its more than 100,000 followers. ‘The monk lacks morals,’ one of the messages read. On the same day, his YouTube channel was also hacked, along with his personal email. Sovath doesn’t know who was behind the attack and about five others that have targeted his pages. But he is the most well-known of Cambodia’s tech-capable monks, who have become citizen journalists, videoing stories throughout Cambodia and sharing them on social media.”
In development: a database of monk chants. “[Kate] Helsen and her colleagues hope to resurrect these prayer cycles with the help of big data and optical music recognition (OMR) software. The effort is called the Optical Neume Recognition Project, and its goal is to build a search engine for sifting through the millions of written ‘neumes,’ which were primitive riffs on notation, that abound in prayer books from the Medieval era.”
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