Faith and Science: One Stop Shopping!

We’re pleased to announce the latest outreach project of the Vatican Observatory Foundation: A Faith and Science resource site (click here!)

Science and religion meet! It was at my Jesuit high school, U of Detroit High, where I first saw Erlenmeyer flasks being used as cruets at the Mass. These are at the Jesuit community chapel at Boston College.

The idea is to have a place where Catholic educators – and educated Catholics – can go to find links to materials all over the web dealing with a variety of topics on the broad issue of Faith and Science.

This web site is not complete, of course, and probably never will be… new material is being posted (and being brought to our attention) all the time. In fact, when you go to the site you’ll notice a certain bias towards material that our own members of the Vatican Observatory, past and present, have prepared and posted on-line.

Rather than describing it further, I encourage you to go explore the site itself. And if you have comments or suggestions, please let us know.

However, there’s one point I do want to make here. Sites like these don’t happen for free. We’ve paid several folks (not nearly what they’re worth) to help design and assemble the coding for the site, and then to find the materials to include, and then to write up the descriptions so that users can get an idea of the individual resources contain – their content, academic level, size, and format – before jumping into them.

The initial funding for all this work has come from a very generous grant from the Templeton foundation. But that funding is only seed money to get us started.

While we insist on making the site open to the public, just like this Catholic Astronomer blog is open for anyone to read, we need donations from the folks like you to keep it running. How can you help out?

We have a place here where you can send us one-time donations. But in fact the best thing, from our point of view, would be if you joined this Catholic Astronomer site as a monthly donor… $10 a month as one of our Pleiades cluster (or more, if you’ve got the resources) makes all the difference. At the moment, our membership is just enough to cover the costs of this blog. We need more members, to cover the cost of the Faith and Astronomy web site as well.

If you like what we’re doing… can you consider joining us in our work? And please, do spread the word. (Say a prayer for us as well…)