Category Archives: And Then I Wrote

ⓜ A familiar tale for a new audience

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This entry is part 9 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote: As I mentioned last week, in 2009 the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom.  Recall, the days of the week in 2009 match those of 2020 (after this year’s leap day) and the liturgical calendar also matches; thus, both in 2009 and 2020, the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time falls on 12 July. Here’s what I wrote for the second reflection… it’s a new retelling of a tale familiar to most of our readers.  Since most of the text material is familiar, I am appending at the end a number of historical images from our archives that you may not have seen before… Studying creation is a time-honored way of coming closer to God. In the opening chapter of his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul points out that, since the beginning of … Continue reading →

ⓜ The Immense Invitation

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This entry is part 13 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… The year 2009 was the International Year of Astronomy: 400 years since Galileo first gazed at the sky through a telescope, and 40 years since humans first set foot on the Moon. In its honor, the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom. As it happens, the days of the week in 2009 match those of 2020 (after this year’s leap day) and the liturgical calendar also matches; thus, both in 2009 and 2020, the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time falls on 5 July. Here’s what I wrote for the first reflection: We all learned in school that the world is round. But, day to day, each of us lives in a much narrower universe. We look to the horizon and see only a flat expanse, a few buildings or trees, with ourselves at … Continue reading →

ⓜ Soft Knox

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This entry is part 10 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Along with being interviewed in a literary blog (see the past two weeks) the year 2009 also saw me preparing a number of blog posts for a once-popular blog site called Live Journal. (Who would have thought that “blogs” would have disappeared so quickly? Another thing to blame on Facebook…) Most of what I wrote was ephemeral, but a few items are worth taking another look at. And the year 2009 was also the year that the Specola moved from its quarters of 70-odd years to new quarters in the Papal Gardens. Moving is never easy; especially when it means moving books that look so enticing to read. This one was a biography that, at first glance, has nothing to do with astronomy, but a lot to do with fame. [In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]

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ⓜ An Interview with The Book Foxes, Part 2

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This entry is part 11 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Last week I ran the first part of my interview that ran in early 2010 on the blog site Vulpis Libris. Here’s the rest of the interview… The idea of a religious university as they exist in the US is not a familiar one for those of us in the UK, although of course our university system has deep confessional roots.  Could you tell us something about the idea – and the practice – of a Jesuit university? The Jesuits got into the education business pretty much by accident. They started out as a group of men who’d met at the University of Paris, who all had advanced degrees, at a time when there was a huge need for educational reform in Europe, and so they were asked to set up schools throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. These schools trained not just clergy but also the children of the burgeoning middle class. The … Continue reading →

ⓜ An Interview with The Book Foxes, Part 1

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This entry is part 12 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Ten years ago, blogs were all the rage, and one in particular that found me (soon after I had published God’s Mechanics) was a book-review site in the UK called Vulpis Libris — “Book Fox” for the Latin-challenged. The blog site moved to a Facebook page in 2017, and since I don’t do Facebook I have no idea what it’s up to anymore. But as it was about books, and I had written a book, they reached out for what turned out to be a lengthy interview. They ran it in two pieces, so that’s how I will run it here. The Interviewer was Kirsty McCluskey, who has gone on to become a respected and widely published journalist (under a number of different names…) Which questions do you most often hear when you do science outreach? “Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?” I have tried being funny (“only if they ask”) and tried being serious. (I wrote … Continue reading →

ⓜ A Foreword to “The Rosary in Space and Time”

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This entry is part 34 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

  (And Then I Wrote…) I’m not sure how I first met the late Ruth Rees… who died on 3 June, 2019, at the age of 91. She was an odd bird in many ways, a little old lady who lived alone in an apartment around the corner from the Baker Street underground station – near where Mr. Sherlock Holmes used to live, of course – and in many ways she was a relic from an age almost as old as Mr. Holmes. It may be that our original connection was through science fiction; she had a cousin who ran a Blake’s 7 fan club, BBC science fiction show from the 1960s that I otherwise know nothing about, and I had met the cousin at various British SF conventions. Be that as it may, Ruth and I did connect and I always did enjoy visiting with her. More than ten years ago she wrote a little book about the Rosary, as … Continue reading →

ⓜ A world of magic

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This entry is part 35 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… this address was at the main science and engineering campus of the the University of Missouri system, Truman State University. I had a wonderful time there, starting with the plane ride from St. Louis in a ten-seater prop plane… To the president, the provost, the dean, I thank you; honored guests, I greet you; to the Truman State University Class of 2015, I congratulate you. I am honored to share this stage with you. Thinking about the class of 2015, I did some calculations… it’s the nerd in me, I know… and I realized that most of you were probably born in the early 1990s, which means you would have been around Harry Potter’s age when those movies came out.  You are the generation who grew up alongside Harry Potter. That’s pretty wonderful. No other generation will be able to say that. And I mention that, because there’s connection between you and Harry Potter. Like Harry … Continue reading →

ⓜ A world of faith

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This entry is part 14 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… just a few months after my Georgetown gig, in December of 2014 I was invited to speak at the winter commencement of the school of arts and sciences at the University of Arizona. For reasons that will be made clear, they did not offer me an honorary degree… To Dean Ruis, Dean Cheu, thank you; honored guests, I greet you; to the University of Arizona College of Science Class of Winter 2014, I congratulate you. I am honored to share this stage with you. I am a planetary scientist and a Jesuit brother. I wear a lot of hats… or collars, as the case may be. One of those hats — this hood — I share with you. I am also a graduate of the University of Arizona, getting my PhD in Planetary Sciences here in 1978. This is an exciting time to be a planetary scientist. Just this month [remember, this was 2014], the New … Continue reading →

Happy Birthday Pope John Paul II

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Today would have been the 100th birthday of Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II. Pope Francis has already celebrated (click here) and of course this event will be especially noted in Poland. As part of that celebration, a Catholic newspaper in Poland, Wszystko Co Najważniejsze, asked me to write a short reflection on what Pope John Paul II meant for the Vatican Observatory. Since they are publishing it in Polish, I thought I would run my original English version here. (Anyone who reads Polish can comment in the comments about how well their translation came across! Actually, we do have two Polish speakers at the Specola… and the Polish website has their edited version of my English text.) The papacy of Saint John Paul II came at a watershed moment in the history of the Vatican Observatory. A new observatory director, Fr. George Coyne SJ, had just been named by his immediate predecessor, John Paul I; but Father Coyne … Continue reading →

ⓜ A world of surprises

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This entry is part 15 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… in 2014, I was honored with an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Of course, they made me sing for my supper… To the president, the provost, the dean, I thank you; honored guests, I greet you; to the Georgetown College Class of 2014, I congratulate you. I am honored to share this stage with you. As you have heard, I am an astronomer; I am also a Jesuit brother. And I work at the Vatican Observatory. A lot of people are surprised to hear that the Vatican City State has its own national observatory. That’s one of the reasons we have it: to surprise people.  But there’s a long and honored history of the Church supporting astronomy. Jesuit astronomers helped Pope Gregory reform the calendar in 1582, and one of those Jesuits, Christopher Clavius, wrote a letter of recommendation for a young Galileo. There’s a crater on the moon named for Father Clavius, along with dozens … Continue reading →

ⓜ Knowing what to dream (a Prize-Giving Day speech)

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This entry is part 16 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… This month is when schools traditionally gather for commencement, and it’s been my honor to have been asked to give a number of commencement addresses; so I figured I would share them here. But this one is a bit different, since it was actually an address to the students of St. Aloysius, the Jesuit High School in Glasgow, Scotland, for their annual Prize Giving Day (which, I believe, was in September not May. The year was 2010, in any event.) As an American, my only experience with the peculiar tradition of giving prizes to high school students was what I had read in P. G. Wodehouse, and it usually involved much quantities of gin before the award. I skipped that part, though as you will see intoxication did play a significant role in what I told them… I am honored to be among you this afternoon, to add my congratulations to those of your faculty. I … Continue reading →

ⓜ Other Worlds, Other Civilizations?

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This entry is part 18 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Finishing up my string of articles for the International Year of Astronomy, this paper was one that I never got to give. I was supposed to fly from London to Italy for a conference on the celebration of Galileo’s telescope, to be held in his old home town of Padua, but the day my flight was scheduled to leave Gatwick the airport was shut down due to snow! The amount of snow would have been nothing in Chicago, but for London it constituted a major blizzard… It was finally published in the proceedings conference proceedings, Galileo’s Medicean Moons: their impact on 400 years of discovery As so many of the presentations at this conference have confirmed, Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope, epitomized by his discovery of satellites orbiting Jupiter, revolutionized astronomy. They also revolutionized our view of the universe, what has been come to be called our scientific “cosmology.” And in the process, they gave a new … Continue reading →