‘A Compression of Human Experience’

Jenny travelled to Turkey to cover an archeological dig at Tel Tayinat just before the civil war in Syria. She found it quite unnerving to be told “turn left at the T-junction, not right. Don’t go to Aleppo (Syria’s most populous city).”

University of Toronto archeologists spent their summers in punishing heat preserving tiny bits of pottery and metal, ‘a compression of human experience,’ as they said. They labelled each one carefully before they returned for more excavation the following summer. One winter, mice ate every single one of the hundreds of labels and the team had to start all over.

Eventually they unearthed a Iron Age city, more than 3,000 years old. Nobody knows what happened to this booming metropolis. It seemed to just vanish. Earthquakes perhaps?

The archeological team painstakingly unearthed and reconstructed pottery

A Revolution in Dying

This was a series of interviews with terminally-ill people who wanted to look back over their lives and pass along their hard-won wisdom before they left us. Some were in posh care facilities where wine was served. Some were in shelters for the unhoused. They had all travelled their own roads and had unique messages for those of us still living. Here’s the story of one man who had wanted to become a priest but, in the end, was glad he didn’t.

In attending the week-long seminar in Rome The Church Up Close, journalists didn’t see the Pope up close as they hoped but they had a tour of the Pontiff’s private gardens and summer palace at Castel Gandolfo 25 km southeast of Rome.