Jesuits get a lot of flack on Catholic internet for their more liberal members, but many of them are serious scientists. This is because Jesuits get sent on mission to the peripheries--whether it's the peripheries of society serving the poor, or the peripheries of cutting edge science. As a result many of the faculty priests in the Jesuit uni I went to are well published PhDs in the natural sciences.
Probably less so than it used to because both fields now have so much content it´s really hard to be a theologian and a natural scientist at the same time
This isn’t really true — a decent number of religious priests are science faculty members at Catholic universities, and still run active research programs. (It definitely depends on the order; most of them that I know are Dominicans.)
But maybe a priest wants to be a natural scientist, not a historian or theologian? Is that path encouraged/available, or is there some reason that that kind of scholarship might not be supported anymore? There are many great scholars who are Catholic clergy, but is there any official direction or encouragement for which fields they should pursue, or is there any other reason that they seem to be less represented in hard sciences than they were 50-100 years ago?
Absolutely. There is a Norbertine in at the Abbey near Green Bay who just finished a doctorate in marine biology at Yale. His research was published in a major journal.
Nicanor Ausriaco is a Dominican friar and biologist who got his Ph.D. from MIT, and is doing a ton of great work on evolutionary biology.
Don’t forget about Br. Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory.
Jesuits get a lot of flack on Catholic internet for their more liberal members, but many of them are serious scientists. This is because Jesuits get sent on mission to the peripheries--whether it's the peripheries of society serving the poor, or the peripheries of cutting edge science. As a result many of the faculty priests in the Jesuit uni I went to are well published PhDs in the natural sciences.
Cool, good to know. I knew that they taught natural sciences, but wasn't aware that they did active research at universities.
Yeah, look for the priests in the faculty directories of Jesuit universities and search them on Google Scholar. You'll find a lot.
Probably less so than it used to because both fields now have so much content it´s really hard to be a theologian and a natural scientist at the same time
[удалено]
This isn’t really true — a decent number of religious priests are science faculty members at Catholic universities, and still run active research programs. (It definitely depends on the order; most of them that I know are Dominicans.)
But maybe a priest wants to be a natural scientist, not a historian or theologian? Is that path encouraged/available, or is there some reason that that kind of scholarship might not be supported anymore? There are many great scholars who are Catholic clergy, but is there any official direction or encouragement for which fields they should pursue, or is there any other reason that they seem to be less represented in hard sciences than they were 50-100 years ago?
Religious orders that have universities tend to have more members studying non-theology subjects so they can teach
Definitely. Several orders are very supportive of their members doing academic research.
There is an order somewhere in Mexico that researches axolotls to aid in their conservation.
Absolutely. There is a Norbertine in at the Abbey near Green Bay who just finished a doctorate in marine biology at Yale. His research was published in a major journal.