From Christ’s 1977 cameo in a tortilla to Mary’s miraculous 2005 appearance in a pizza pan, there’s a long litany of modern instances in which the holy brood “revealed” themselves in our edibles. To the devout, these cases are nothing less than divine intervention. To others they’re nothing more than optical illusions.
Scientists refer to this phenomenon as pareidolia, in which banal images are given great significance. Whether it’s transforming a cloud into a lamb, or a piece of dry bread into Jesus, pareidolia’s considered nothing more than a mental projection.
When cloaked in the sacred, pareidolia can be called “simulacra,” or similarity, in which the viewer exports spiritual meaning onto something that, from a more secular person’s perspective, could be seen as something else entirely.
In all cases, however, people saw a face, because, as scientists contend, we humans are programmed to organize patterns into an image, most often a face. The abundance of religion in our various societies, meanwhile, often translates those “faces” into sacred celebrities. And of course Christians aren’t the only devout people who project prophets onto their edibles: Allah has also been seen in fish, bread and animals’ fur.
University of North Carolina Professor Gregory Price Grieve explains that this habit arose from an overabundance of religious imagery in our various cultures: “What you see is not always what you get. Instead, what we see depends on mediation,” he wrote in a paper called “One and Three Bhairavas: The Hypocrisy of Iconographic Mediation.”
“Because our descriptions of religious images are culturally located, our ‘naïve’ descriptions are neither innocent nor objective. Rather, all social objects are mediated by intervening socially grounded, culturally generated, and historically particular mechanisms.”
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There’s likely to be no end to reports of “Jesus’ face found in X,” and as oddball as they seem to some, to others they’re reminders of religion’s miraculous nature. Regardless of where you stand, these stories, rumors and legends point to a larger cultural debate: whether science and pareidolia have the answers, or whether there are less comprehensible forces at work.
The ongoing debate over “reason versus religion” remains so universal, not even our refrigerators are off limits.
Terren's Christmas projects are some of his favourites - last year he created a nine-metre high Christmas tree using lightning-like sparks from a tesla coil and long-exposure photography; this year he's strapped a Christmas tree to a bicycle with a front light that is so powerful it could be seen from the International Space Station with the same intensity as a bright star (when pointed at the sky).
"I would love to send some Morse code to the International Space Station," said Terren, 54.
He has applied to Guinness for the "world's brightest bike light" record, saying he has done his research and, at 100,000 lumens, his creation is five times brighter than any other bike light he's seen.
"The current world record holder in Guinness looks pale by comparison," he said.
Terren said he got the idea for the project on one of his night-time bicycle rides. He does not own a car.
"I have had kangaroos jump out in front of me so this gives me the upper hand," he said.
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His 2010 Christmas rig uses 18 high-powered 100 watt LED lights - 15 at the front and three at the rear to light up the tree. It is powered by three deep cycle industrial batteries weighing over 30 kilograms.
Terren was planning to ride it in his local Christmas parade but says "bureaucracy" and a lack of liability insurance prevented him from doing so. It's illegal to ride on the open road due to the light intensity.
Our thoughts turn back to a moment in history when God's chosen people, the children of Israel, were living in intense expectation.
They were waiting for the Messiah that God had promised to send, and they pictured him as a great leader who would rescue them from foreign domination and restore their freedom.
God is always faithful to his promises, but he often surprises us in the way he fulfils them.
The child that was born in Bethlehem did indeed bring liberation, but not only for the people of that time and place - he was to be the Saviour of all people throughout the world and throughout history.
And it was not a political liberation that he brought, achieved through military means: rather, Christ destroyed death for ever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross.
And while he was born in poverty and obscurity, far from the centres of earthly power, he was none other than the Son of God.
Out of love for us he took upon himself our human condition, our fragility, our vulnerability, and he opened up for us the path that leads to the fullness of life, to a share in the life of God himself.
As we ponder this great mystery in our hearts this Christmas, let us give thanks to God for his goodness to us, and let us joyfully proclaim to those around us the good news that God offers us freedom from whatever weighs us down; he gives us hope, he brings us life.
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May God bless all of you.
We American Christians have a way of taking the Jesus of the Bible and twisting him into a version of Jesus that we are more comfortable with.
A nice middle-class American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts.
A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who for that matter wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings comfort and prosperity to us as we live out our Christian spin on the American Dream.
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Jesus has different priorities. Instead of congratulating us on our self-fulfillment, he confronts us with our inability to accomplish anything of value apart from God. Instead of wanting us to be recognized by others, he beckons us to die to ourselves and seek above all the glory of God.
In my own faith family, the Church at Brook Hills, we have tried to get out from under the American Dream mindset and start living and serving differently.
Like many other large American churches, we had a multimillion-dollar campus and plans to make it even larger to house programs that would cater to our own desires. But then we started looking at the world we live in.
It’s a world where 26,000 children die every day of starvation or a preventable disease. A world where billions live in situations of such grinding poverty that an American middle-class neighborhood looks like Beverly Hills by comparison. A world where more than a billion people have never even heard the name Jesus. So we asked ourselves, “What are we spending our time and money on that is less important than meeting these needs?” And that’s when things started to change.
First we gave away our entire surplus fund - $500,000 - through partnerships with churches in India, where 41 percent of the world’s poor live. Then we trimmed another $1.5 million from our budget and used the savings to build wells, improve education, provide medical care and share the gospel in impoverished places around the world. Literally hundreds of church members have gone overseas temporarily or permanently to serve in such places.
And it’s not just distant needs we’re trying to meet. It’s also needs near at hand.
One day I called up the Department of Human Resources in Shelby County, Alabama, where our church is located, and asked, “How many families would you need in order to take care of all the foster and adoption needs that we have in our county?”
The woman I was talking to laughed.
I said, “No, really, if a miracle were to take place, how many families would be sufficient to cover all the different needs you have?”
She replied, “It would be a miracle if we had 150 more families.”
When I shared this conversation with our church, over 160 families signed up to help with foster care and adoption. We don’t want even one child in our county to be without a loving home. It’s not the way of the American Dream. It doesn’t add to our comfort, prosperity, or ease. But we are discovering the indescribable joy of sacrificial love for others, and along the way we are learning more about the inexpressible wonder of God’s sacrificial love for us.
Most people wake up in the morning and get dressed. Last week, I agreed to hop out of bed and not get dressed. I called it Naked Week.
I believe that a lot of things are better without clothes: Bubble baths, swimming under the stars, frolicking between the sheets. When it's time to cook dinner, scrub the tub or watch "The Big Bang Theory," I prefer to be wearing clothes.
I agreed to take it all off for a week in the name of journalism. At first, I was going to pass on the assignment. I had all sorts of excuses: How will I walk the dogs? What if the UPS man knocks on the door? It's too cold to be naked!
But I decided that it might be fun and thought I could learn something so I signed on.
For an entire week, as long as I was at home, I was naked. I wrote articles, interviewed sources, washed dishes, paid bills and watched TV all while I was naked.
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I counted the minutes until the naked experiment was over because there was something awkward about resting a bucket of suds on a naked thigh before setting it down to mop the floor or folding pants while wearing none. I found it downright comical when I stood in front of the fridge and searched for ingredients for dinner while staring at a cantaloupe and cucumbers! (Yes, being naked gave me the mindset of a prepubescent tween).
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If Naked Week taught me one thing, it's that I need to work on being more comfortable in my own skin, even if it is in dire need of moisturizer. I might start sleeping naked or doing the weekend crossword puzzle in the buff. But for now, I'm off to put on some pants.
Beginning on Christmas Eve, 1861, and continuing into early 1862, an extreme series of storms lasting 45 days struck California. The storms caused severe flooding, turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, forcing the State Capital to be moved from Sacramento to San Francisco for a time, and requiring Governor Leland Stanford to take a rowboat to his inauguration. William Brewer, author of “Up and down California,” wrote on January 19, 1862, “The great central valley of the state is under water—the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys—a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide, or probably three to three and a half millions of acres!” In southern California lakes were formed in the Mojave Desert and the Los Angeles Basin. The Santa Ana River tripled its highest-ever estimated discharge, cutting arroyos into the southern California landscape and obliterating the ironically named Agua Mansa (Smooth Water), then the largest community between New Mexico and Los Angeles. The storms wiped out nearly a third of the taxable land in California, leaving the State bankrupt.
The 1861-62 series of storms were probably the largest and longest California storms on record. However, geological evidence suggests that earlier, prehistoric floods were likely even bigger. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that such extreme storms could not happen again. However, despite the historical and prehistorical evidence for extreme winter storms on the West Coast, the potential for these extreme events has not attracted public concern, as have hurricanes. The storms of 1861-62 happened long before living memory, and the hazards associated with such extreme winter storms have not tested modern infrastructure nor the preparedness of the emergency management community.
... all the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change the fact that any government agency or process big enough to control a major sector of our economy will be prone to influence by those most affected by it. Even film critic Roger Ebert, a vociferous Net Neutrality supporter, pointed out this problem in a Tweet on Monday night, saying: "Both Left and Right slam FCC on Net Neutrality. Only the lobbyists like it, possibly because their jobs depend on it."
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Some will argue that things have changed and that a better breed of bureaucrat and legislator now is in charge, immune from such influence. It's a hard case to make, though, especially when Washington is teeming with telecom, media, and technology lobbyists and lawyers hungry to grow the regulatory state in various ways.
Thus, for all the talk we hear about how the FCC's move to impose Net Neutrality regulation is about "putting consumers first" or "preserving Net freedom and openness," it's difficult to ignore the small armies of special interests who stand ready to exploit this new regulatory regime the same way they did telecom and broadcast industry regulation during decades past.
"Net neutrality" sounds good to anyone not paying attention, but it must be accomplished by a seizure of authority to do so, a seizure not by Congress (which would be scary enough), but by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Anyone paying attention can see how this would be a first step toward revival of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, sought by Barack Obama and the Democrats since he first arrived in Washington.
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The new "net-neutrality" regulations here, which will have the force of law though Congress need have nothing to do with writing them, will be considered for a vote by the FCC on Tuesday. The rules being considered for the Tuesday vote are technical and complicated, and the timing of the vote clearly was arranged for Christmas week, when most people are delighted not to have to think about Washington and the trouble it makes for the rest of us.
But the FCC's power grab has attracted a diverse array of naysayers anyway. The liberal Democrats are mostly concerned that the FCC will write rules to give breaks to Internet providers, the conservative Republicans that it's a first step toward content control.
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... there's something about the defiance of top-down authority and people exercising their freedoms that makes certain government officials break out in a rash. Even now some of the busybody countries at the United Nations are working on setting up "a working group" to "harmonize" global efforts to regulate the Internet. Alas, this is scariest of all. "Harmony" suggests everyone singing together to a tune written to U.N. satisfaction. Nothing is broken about the Internet that needs fixing, which is why certain cunning saboteurs are so eager to "fix" it.
President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."
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After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform" — a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.
Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement.
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Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."
Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.
The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.
The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.
So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.
Bugarach, population 189, is a peaceful farming village in the Aude region, southwestern France and sits at the foot of the Pic de Bugarach, the highest mountain in the Corbières wine-growing area.The village of Bugarach (image courtesy of Wikipedia)
But in the past few months, the quiet village has been inundated by groups of esoteric outsiders who believe the peak is an "alien garage".
According to them, extraterrestrials are quietly waiting in a massive cavity beneath the rock for the world to end, at which point they will leave, taking, it is hoped, a lucky few humans with them.
Most believe Armageddon will take place on December 21, 2012, the end date of the ancient Maya calendar, at which point they predict human civilisation will come to an end. Another favourite date mentioned is 12, December, 2012. They see Bugarach as one of perhaps several "sacred mountains" sheltered from the cataclysm.
"This is no laughing matter," Jean-Pierre Delord, the mayor, told The Daily Telegraph.
"If tomorrow 10,000 people turn up, as a village of 200 people we will not be able to cope. I have informed the regional authorities of our concerns and want the army to be at hand if necessary come December 2012."
Mr Delord said people had been coming to the village for the past 10 years or so in search of alien life following a post in an UFO review by a local man, who has since died. "He claimed he had seen aliens and heard the humming of their spacecraft under the mountain," he said.
The internet abounds with tales of the late President François Mitterrand being curiously heliported on to the peak, of mysterious digs conducted by the Nazis and later Mossad, the Israeli secret services.
A visit to Bugarach is said to have inspired Steven Spielberg in his film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind – although the actual mountain he used is Devil's Tower in Wyoming. It is also where Jules Verne found the entrance and the inspiration for A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Recently, however, interest in the site had skyrocketed, said the mayor, with online UFO websites, many in the US, advising people to seek shelter in Bugarach as the countdown to Armageddon commences.
"Many come and pray on the mountainside. I've even seen one man doing some ritual totally nude up there," said Mr Delord.
Sigrid Benard, who runs the Maison de la Nature guesthouse, said UFO tourists were taking over. "At first, my clientele was 72 per cent ramblers. Today, I have 68 per cent 'esoteric visitors'," he said.
Several "Ufologists" have bought up properties in the small hamlet of Le Linas, in the mountain's shadow for "extortionate" prices, and locals have complained they are being priced out of the market. Strange sect-like courses are held for up to €800 a week. "For this price, you are introduced to a guru, made to go on a procession, offered a christening and other rubbish, all payable in cash," said Mr Delord.
Pizza is the most sensuous of foods. I get emails from around the world and one of the most common goes something like this: "Jeff, I had this one perfect pizza at a corner shop in Brooklyn in 1972 and I've been thinking about it ever since." I love that! That's passion. Do you know how many forgettable meals have come and gone since then? What kind of pizza leaves a 35 year impression? Let me describe it to you. The crust is slightly charred. It has a crisp outer layer, but inside it's airy and light. The ingredients are not piled high, but instead are perfectly balanced. It's sweet, salty, full flavored but not greasy. The tomatoes burst with flavor. Each bite makes you hungrier for the next. If this is what you want, you've come to the right place.
This pizza is modeled after Patsy's on 117th street in NYC. I have been working on this for SIX years, but FINALLY I can report that I have achieved my goal. Many people have tried my pie and swear it is not only the best pizza they've ever had, but a clone of the original Patsy's recipe. This margarita pie is incredibly light and perfectly charred. It took just 2 minutes and 10 seconds to bake at 825° F.
What appeared to be a standard and presumably lucrative celebrity endorsement has run headlong into a passionate dispute over a bloody chapter in history that took place in the highlands of eastern Turkey nearly a century ago.
Armenian groups and many scholars argue that starting in 1915, Turks committed genocide, when more than a million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.
Modern-day Turkey officially denies that a genocide took place, arguing instead that hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians and Muslim Turks died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I.
South Gloucestershire Council has been criticised for installing white bollards on a cycle path - which has led to cyclists crashing into them in the snow.
Cyclist Ian Redmond, 56, a biologist, was on his way from Bristol Parkway Station to the city's university when he smashed into one of the bollards, which blended perfectly into the white line marking the boundary between the cycle path and footpath.
The biologist split his lip open, cut his forehead and suffered severe bruising on his hand and thigh when he fell off his bicycle and onto the concrete path.
He is now calling for council chiefs to remove the 'public menace' bollards, which he fears will cause serious injury to other cyclists and pedestrians.
Redmond said: 'I've cycled on the route for more than 25 years and there is no need for bollards to be put there. I just can't understand it.
'The bollards are solid cast and painted white so in any conditions of limited visibility they are perfectly camouflaged against the white line.
'As a biologist, I am familiar with cryptic colouration, which works well for Arctic hares and polar bears, but I'd never considered it a suitable characteristic for traffic bollards.'
