I’ve taken a very long hiatus from writing my blog, having been preoccupied at work and home with other concerns. But now that I’ve cleaned up the thousands of spammed posts that never got approved, deleted the fictitious rabble from the list of registered users on my site, and generally set about the task of thinking how I’d like to continue, I’ve decided to get back to it.
One thing that happened over the intervening years is that I’ve come to appreciate my Catholic faith more deeply. I’m currently half-way through the Adult Faith Formation classes taught by the Kino Institute at the Diocesan Center in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, and this more than anything has helped me to see the beauty of Catholic teaching amid a world in dire need of peace and people of good will. For this reason, I plan to add my personal thoughts on religion as a general topic to this blog. For those of you familiar with the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), the definitive source of the official teachings of the Church, you’ll perhaps remember that it is known as the Church of “both / and,” as opposed to “either / or.” This is why you’ll find an interesting passage in paragraph 159:
Faith and science: Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. [CCC159 – scroll down to paragraph 159].
And so it seems entirely appropriate to me to spend time writing about science, engineering, and religion, all in the same space, and with equal deference to the marvels ascribed to all three topics.