A digital guru with a growing legion of 4,000 Twitter followers, Fr.  Ballecer operates his own website, The Tech Stop, which he calls a “site with a soul.”  He also hosts “This Week in Enterprise Tech” (TWiET) on the online tech network TWiT.

Fr. Ballecer, who wears a Roman collar and identifies himself as a Jesuit on the show, says it’s been amazing to read the comments in the chat room from different episodes. There’s been a shift from “Why is there a priest on the tech network?” to the same people saying, “Fr. Robert actually knows what he’s talking about.”

So how did this self-proclaimed geek from Fremont, Calif. end up becoming a priest?

“My vocation story was a little less light from the heavens and a little more gradual leading me up to the inescapable conclusion that this is the only life I’d be happy in,” says Fr. Ballecer.

A first generation Philippine American, Fr. Ballecer was focused on making his mark in business and had already started a computer consulting firm by the time he was an undergrad at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif.  But he quickly realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

A Jesuit priest at Santa Clara helped him recognize his calling. “The Jesuits I saw on campus were some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. They were some of the most brilliant people I’d ever met,” says Fr. Ballecer. “They seemed to have what I wanted — a satisfaction in life. That’s what set me on the track to join.”

After two years of doing retreats and spiritual direction while a student at Santa Clara, Fr. Ballecer says there were “angst ridden” days where he fought against his calling to join the Society of Jesus. “I was fighting myself, thinking why would I want to do this? I’ve worked all my life to get out of poverty and now I want to take a vow of poverty?”

Once Fr. Ballecer joined the Jesuits, he said that his experience in the novitiate cemented that this was the life he wanted to live.

A Jesuit and a Techie

Before becoming the National Director for Vocation Promotion three years ago, Fr. Ballecer was assigned to parishes in California and Hawaii, and he’s also served in China, the Philippines and Bolivia. In addition to his ministries, he’s stayed active in the tech world, with projects such as “Gadget,” an online show he’s run as a hobby for the past five years, which has received over 14 million YouTube views.

Fr. Ballecer’s tech expertise is a perfect fit for vocation promotion with the Millennial Generation (age 28 and younger).

At last count his office has created over 600 hours of You Tube content — from interviews with Jesuits to videos from World Youth Day to his tech content.  “The strategy has been to say anything that shows priests and Jesuits doing things that others might be interested in — that’s vocation promotion and that’s what we want to show,” explains Fr. Ballecer.

One of his projects was a video series called “Path to Priesthood,” which followed Jesuit Radmar Jao from his deaconate ordination to his priestly ordination. The popular series was picked up by CatholicTV.

Pursue Your Passion and Your Vocation

Fr. Ballecer says that the Society wants to encourage more Jesuits to show their competence in venues that will reach out to the Millennial Generation. “We want to reach out to people who are looking for something to believe in,” he says.

“I’ve been using the weekly online show as a forum to say ‘Look I’m a priest and I’m a man of faith, but at the same time I have a sense of humor and I’m very competent about my subject material. I’m willing to listen to all different ideas.’ ”

One of Fr. Ballecer’s first vocation promotion projects was “Jesuits Revealed,” a video series of interviews with Jesuits from around the country with different areas of expertise.

“We have these three-minute vignettes into the life of Jesuits and if you watched enough of them you could find someone who believed like you, who grew up like you, who had the same interests as you. It’s reinforcing that a life of faith and a life of the priesthood is not what you think it is,” Fr. Ballecer says.

One of the things Fr. Ballecer tells vocation promoters to look for is the aha moment.

“The aha moment is anything that you do, anything that you say, anything that makes someone say, ‘I didn’t know that about faith or I didn’t know that about religious life.’ It’s where old, preconceived notions are emptied out and you get an understanding that you didn’t have before. I think all vocation promotion is built on that aha moment.”

For anyone considering a Jesuit vocation who may not think they fit the right mold, Fr. Ballecer says, “We’re not calling for what you think a priest is. We’re asking who you are, and we’re saying we can use that in the priesthood.”

He backs up his statement with his new film, “Cosmic Origins,” a 49-minute documentary that features eight physicists who discuss the big bang theory, theories of modern physics and the need for a creator.

Along with Fr. Spitzer, founder of the Magis Center for Faith and Reason, the film features Michael Heller of the Vatican Observatory, Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias and professors from Harvard and Cambridge.

In choosing the physicists for the film, Fr. Spitzer made sure that  every scientist was “absolutely top in their field, world class, they had to be a Nobel prize winner, a Templeton prize winner or come from Harvard or Cambridge or from the top ranks of NASA.”

The scientists affirm that it is impossible for the universe to be random and without purpose, he said.

“When the universe was nothing, it could not have moved itself from nothing, something else had to do it, and that something else was a transcendent creator,” Fr. Spitzer said.

Fr. Spitzer claims that this creator would have to exist outside space and time because before the Big Bang, nothing existed, including space and time.

“Cosmic Origins” is available on Amazon, and information on a parish screening program is available through the “Cosmic Origins” website, www.cosmicoriginsfilm.com. Read more on Fr. Spitzer and his new film at Catholic News Agency.

With news about the Higgs boson particle, the so-called “God Particle,” that’s helping scientists understand how the universe was built, Br. Consolmagno says he’s explained multiple times that “No, the God Particle has nothing to do with God…”

Although not a particle physicist, Br. Consolmagno is often interviewed because of his role as a Vatican astronomer. He says some are surprised to hear that the Vatican supports an astronomical observatory, but that science and religion complement each other:

But the real reason we do science is in fact related to the reason why so many people ask us about things like the God Particle. The disciplines of science and religion complement each other in practical ways. For example, both are involved in describing things that are beyond human language and so must speak in metaphors. Not only is the ‘God Particle’ not a piece of God, it is also not really a ‘particle’ in the sense that a speck of dust is a particle. In both cases we use familiar images to try to illustrate an entity of great importance but whose reality is beyond our power to describe literally.

Read more of Br. Consolmagno’s commentary on the Higgs boson discovery on Catholic News Service and Catholic News Agency.

Membership in Sigma Xi is by invitation with full membership conferred upon those who have demonstrated noteworthy achievements in research. More than 200 members have won the Nobel Prize and many more have earned election to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.

Fr. Acker will be begin his duties the summer of 2012.

One of the things that attracted me to the Society of Jesus was the Ignatian principle of finding God in all things. I saw Jesuits seeking and finding God in so many ways, from ministering in the Third World, to delving into questions of philosophy and theology to exploring the grandeur of the universe.

As someone with a background in physics and astronomy, I am no stranger to the idea that by studying God’s creation we encounter God. As a 38-year-old, first-year theology student at Boston College and a recent graduate of a physics doctoral program, I can see in hindsight a pattern of formation as a Jesuit brother that has only strengthened this idea.

After I completed philosophy studies in 2006, I began my regency assignment teaching physics and astronomy at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, a wonderful opportunity to teach in my field and minister to students.  During that time, I heard from a friend at the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who told me about an opportunity to study meteorite physical properties in a doctoral program at the University of Central Florida. I had spent a summer at the Vatican Observatory doing exactly that kind of research. So, with the provincial’s blessing, I left regency after only one year and spent the next four years at the University of Central Florida measuring the densities of meteorites, the percentages of pore space within them and their responses to a magnetic field. And somehow, as part of graduate studies and in the context of Jesuit life, I was to find God in these rocks from outer space.

Studying meteorites can be tedious work, but the pursuit involved travel to New York, Washington, Chicago and London where meteorites are held in museum or university collections.

As I studied more than 1,300 specimens, sometimes the tedium of the repetitive process became too great. I then would hold one of the more primitive meteorites in my hand and muse upon it, reminding myself that it was 4.5 billion years old, one of the earliest objects to form when the solar system itself was forming, and holding clues to that history.

Embedded within the meteorite are a few tiny grains of material that survived the heat and shock of its forming and that remain essentially unchanged from the moment they were created in stars. They are literally stardust. I am awestruck, and in that awe I once again encounter God.

This work also allowed me to minister to people in the sciences. Simply by being a scientist and a member of a religious order, I stand as a counterexample to the false notion that science and faith are incompatible. My presence has sparked many conversations with colleagues who wish to explore that idea more deeply and who have no other way to do so.

Now that the doctorate is completed and theological studies have begun, I have not abandoned the pursuit of science. A Jesuit in the physics department at Boston College, Fr. Cyril Opeil, has provided space in his lab where I can construct some new research instruments. Furthermore, by helping out with campus ministry at my alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I can continue to have good conversations about faith and science with its many students of science and engineering.

In my spare time, I research properties of lunar materials, which led to a visit over Christmas break to study Apollo moon rocks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But most importantly, I am discovering that theology studies themselves provide tools for integrating these pursuits with the many other ways in which we are called to find God in all things.

This reflection originally appeared in Southern Jesuit Magazine. To download the full magazine, please click here.

As a priest and an astronomer, Jesuit Father George Coyne bridges the worlds of faith and science, but he’s quick to acknowledge that they serve two different purposes. “I can’t know if there is a God or if there is not a God by science,” he says. 

At the same time the emeritus director of the Vatican Observatory sees no conflict between scientific and religious knowledge, though he admits that the church has not always agreed. But even in the famous case of the astronomer Galileo, there were issues other than science at stake, notably who could interpret the Bible. “Galileo was never given a chance to talk about his science,” Coyne says. “Galileo knew how to interpret scripture, but he did it privately.” The Council of Trent had forbidden private interpretation 70 years before in response to the Reformation.

Still, says Coyne, Galileo pointed the way to a happier relationship between faith and science. “Galileo anticipated by four centuries what the church would finally say about the interpretation of scripture,” argues Coyne. “Galileo said that scripture was written to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

Fr. Coyne recently sat down with U.S. Catholic Magazine for a question-and-answer session about Catholicism, science and the human experience.

Give us some amazing facts about the universe that would enrich a Catholic understanding of faith.

The universe understood scientifically is an amazing challenge to both science and to religious faith. The scientific facts about the universe are very well established. First the universe is 13.7 billion years old. A billion is a one with nine zeroes behind it, so that’s a lot of years. Second, it contains 10,000 billion billion stars. That’s a one with 22 zeroes behind it.

We know the age of the universe by its expansion: Galaxies are all moving away from us. There is a very tight relationship between their distance from us and their speed. Namely, the farther away an object is, the faster it is going. If you’re two times farther away from me, you’re going away four times faster. If you’re four times farther away from me, you’re going away 16 times faster. It holds for every galaxy in the whole universe.

When we measure the age of the universe by its expansion, we discover that the universe began to expand 13.7 billion years ago, plus or minus 200 million years. It’s an amazing measurement.

How do we count all those stars?

When the Hubble telescope takes a photograph of the most distant part of the universe we can see, it produces an image called the Hubble Deep Field. The image has millions of dots of light, and every one of those dots of light is a galaxy. Hubble concentrated on a very small part of the sky, one-twentieth of the thickness of my index finger held at arm’s length. So you have a million galaxies in this little piece of the sky. What if we measured the whole sky? By multiplying all that together you get 100 billion galaxies, each of which contains, on the average, 200 billion stars.

What’s so important about that?

Now I’m getting into the religious implications. How did we come to be in this universe? The classical question is: Did this happen by chance, or was it necessary that we would come to be?

The question is a scientific question at first. Was it by chance or by necessity? We know the processes. The answer, according to modern science, is that it’s both: chance and necessity in a fertile universe.

What do you mean by a “fertile universe”?

A star lives, so to speak, by a thermonuclear furnace at its center, created by the collapse of gas that raises the temperature to millions of degrees. The furnace converts hydrogen to helium. If the star has enough mass, it will collapse again, raise the temperature even higher, and convert helium to carbon, carbon to nitrogen, and so on. As a star lives, depending on its mass, it converts lighter elements into heavier elements. When it dies, it spews out these elements to the universe.

When a generation of stars dies, a new generation is formed from that gas, which is no longer just hydrogen but is enriched with helium, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, even iron. Our sun is a third-generation star. If it were not, we wouldn’t be here.

We needed three generations of stars to get a star that could furnish the elements for life. That’s what I mean by the fertility of the universe, that through physical processes in the universe, we’re building up the chemistry until we have the chemistry for life.

What about chance and necessity?

Over 14 billion years with all these stars pouring out all this chemistry, imagine what has been happening.

The universe has a structure to it. It has laws of nature. When two hydrogen atoms meet, they have to make a hydrogen molecule. But sometimes they don’t because the temperature and pressure conditions are not correct.

So they wander throughout the universe and meet trillions of times. There are trillions of hydrogen atoms doing this. It shouldn’t surprise us when, by chance, two atoms meet at a time when the temperature and pressure conditions are correct, and they make a hydrogen molecule.

That’s “chance,” but it is also more than just chance. The two hydrogen atoms have to make a hydrogen molecule if they meet with the correct conditions. We can put a probability on that. Around some stars it’s more probable because the temperature conditions are different. In some galaxies it’s more probable. It’s a combination of chance and necessity, but in a fertile universe there are many possibilities for this to happen.

With all this chemistry available over 14 billion years, chance and necessity work together to build up ever more complex molecules. You get proteins, amino acids and sugars, DNA, livers, hearts, and eventually the human brain through biological evolution.

How does God fit into that?

We know the scientific process that brought us to be. But a religious believer then asks, “Did God do it, since it seems to have a structured evolution toward a human being?”

Did God do it? Speaking as a scientist, my answer is: I don’t know. There’s no way I can know scientifically if God did it. I can be amazed that there is this movement to ever more complex, more adapted organisms, including human beings. But to me as a scientist the human being is a complex biological organism. I can’t talk about the spiritual character of the human being.

I can get evidence of it. But I can’t talk about it as a scientist, and I can’t talk about God as a scientist. If I try, I’m not doing science. I think it’s very important in modern society, certainly in modern America, not to confuse what we know from science with what we know from philosophy, theology, literature, and music.

Human culture is vast, and science is an important part of human culture. But it’s not everything.

I believe that God created the universe, and because I believe that God created the universe, I think it is valid for me as a scientist to say, “I know what the universe is like. What kind of God would make a universe like this?”

How do you answer that question?

It’s a marvelous God to my mind. In creating the universe, God did not make a washing machine or a car. God made something dynamic.

Creation has an evolutionary character to it. There is chance involved. This God didn’t make something predetermined. We don’t know completely where it’s going, even scientifically. We can’t predict everything.

Is God omnipotent? Is God omniscient as I was taught? Would God be able to know at the beginning of the universe that I was going to be born?

To respect the science, I have to say no, because God cannot know what’s not knowable. Since there are chance processes involved, it’s not completely knowable according to science. Does that limit God? Does that minimize God? I don’t think so. It glorifies God: God did not want to have something that was completely predetermined.

That God sounds different from many common understandings.

Whenever we talk about God, we’re babbling. We’re doing our best from what we know. God is not just an object that we talk about and think about and pray to. God is the source of everything, of all knowledge. But I do insist that our knowledge of God should respect our knowledge of the universe and of ourselves in the universe. That’s a challenge, but it’s a happy challenge.

I believe that God is omniscient and omnipotent. But then I have to think about what I’m saying and ask, “What do I mean by that?” I surely mean that God is all-powerful, but can God do anything God wants to do? The universe appears to me to not allow that, but it’s because God wanted the universe to be the way it is.

Why do some believers want to ignore or reject scientific knowledge?

It’s not so much they’re ignorant from the point of view of what science knows or ignorant from the point of view of what religious faith is. They don’t want to face the challenge of putting them together. But there’s no conflict—a challenge, yes. But I can’t see that there ever could be any conflict between true religious faith and true science.

Then why do faith and science seem to be at loggerheads?

Because of you journalists! I’m only kidding, but some journalists really do seem to want to stir the pot.

One problem is scientists who claim they’re practicing science when they either assert or deny God’s presence. They’re stepping outside science.

I get into trouble when I say it, but atheism is a practice of faith. An atheist cannot prove to me there is no God. The evidence we have through all of human history documents people’s deep-rooted belief in God.

Some scientists will say we’re all being duped, but that is not reasonable. Science is a rational process. It’s using our intelligence to try and understand the universe, as is philosophy, as is theology, by the way. It’s an attempt to understand.

Faith goes beyond reason, but it doesn’t contradict reason. I’m thoroughly convinced of that, not just in my own life, but in the reality of what religious faith is and what human reason can accomplish.

Most of the scientists I know who are atheists are deeply respectful of human faith. The ones that aren’t don’t understand it. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote A Brief History of Time (Bantam), are both eminent scientists. But they don’t understand what religious faith is. I’ve had conversations with both, and I’ve said that to them. They respect me because they realize that I’m an objective, working scientist just as they are.

What are they missing?

Stephen Hawking’s concept of God is that God is something we need to explain parts of the universe we don’t understand. I tell him, “Stephen, I’m sorry, but God is a God of love. He’s not a being I haul in to explain things when I can’t explain them myself.”

I once said to Richard Dawkins, “Richard, why did you marry the lady you married? Because she has blue eyes, paints her toenails red, has curly hair?” When you put all the facts together in general human experience—not just religious experience—you can’t explain it all rationally. Human experience has a nonrational character. That doesn’t make it irrational. You’re not crazy—you may be crazy in love—but all that means is that you can’t explain everything.

When you pray, does it make any difference that the universe has 10,000 billion billion stars?

Absolutely. When I pray to God, it’s a totally different God than I prayed to as a kid. The God that I pray to now is a God who not only made me but brought me to be in a universe that is dynamic and creative. The universe is not itself a living being, but it is a universe that has thus far given birth to human beings who can pray to God.

I pray to a God that, from my scientific knowledge, has made a universe in which people have come to be and are still coming to be, even from a scientific perspective. The universe is continuing to expand. Just in the past 50 years, look at what the human being has come to be. I’m talking about technology.

When I was growing up we had no television. Now you have one in your pocket. That is a development of the human being. Technology is an extension of ourselves.

Is there anything special about us in this enormous universe?

We are very special to God, and there’s no doubt about it. I mean, God sent his only Son to us. Being special as a piece of material in the universe is one thing; being special in knowing religious history and living a faith-filled life is another. But it’s still a challenge.

As material objects in the universe, it would be difficult for me as a scientist to defend that we’re special. Our history as human civilization certainly makes us special. But what if there is another civilization out there that is intelligent and spiritual, that has a special relationship to God? What would that do to us?

I’m going to leave that to theologians. But could God send his only-begotten Son, true God and true man, to become true God and true Martian, or whatever it is? Well, I find that very difficult to accept. But I can’t exclude it. I don’t know enough to exclude it, and I can’t limit God.

This is getting into science fiction, but in the end if God treated another spiritual civilization in a very special way, does that detract from his treating us in a very special way, however he dealt with them in the concrete?

I’m one of 10 kids. If my mother decided to buy me a new pair of pants, does that make my brother less special to my mother? I can’t imagine that discovering an intelligent, spiritual civilization that God loves in his own way would detract from God loving us.

After speaking at the Jesuit Brothers Institute on Jesuits in the Sciences, Br. Consolmagno took some time out to sit down with National Jesuit News and share the story of his vocation:

Coyne’s arrival comes at a time of exceptional student interest in the natural sciences and allied health fields at Le Moyne. Opening this month, its new science complex will house the physical, life and health sciences. This addition is a 50,000-square-foot building that will adjoin the reconfigured Coyne Science Center for a total of 105,000 square feet of academic space. The complex includes teaching facilities to accommodate large introductory-level classes and small upper-level classes, as well as cutting-edge facilities for faculty research and faculty-mentored student research.

Fr. Nebres was recognized for his outstanding achievements and accomplishments as a mathematician, educator, mentor and administrator and for his contributions to education and social reform.

In his speech at the conferment rites in Malacañang, President Aquino cited some of the achievements of the 71-year-old Nebres; helping establish the Ateneo Center for Educational Development, which he noted focuses on improving education in public schools. ACED now works with local governments with over 400 public schools in Quezon City, Parañaque, Valenzuela, Nueva Ecija, La Union and other parts of the country.

The President noted that Nebres was now chairman of the Synergeia Foundation which works with public schools in over 200 municipalities, including some in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Nebres said he was supposed to receive the award early this year along with Raul Fabella, his co-awardee as National Scientist for this year, but he said he was in Europe when the Palace announced the award.

He is the 37th National Scientist of the country and one of the only 15 awardees alive today.

His research interests have included the investigation of abnormal gene regulation in cancer and ethical issues in human genetics, including the ethical and social ramifications of molecular genetics research. He is an expert on ethical issues in personalized medicine, pharmacogenomics, human cloning research, stem cell research, and genetic testing.

Fr. FitzGerald recently sat down with National Jesuit News to discuss how being a priest and a scientist go hand-in-hand, and how the Church should learn to anticipate upcoming ethical questions.