Category: Announcement

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April Showers Will (hopefully) Bring May (and beyond) Flowers

Dear friends of religion-online.org:

Before the end of this month you will notice some additions to this website. If all works well the additions should continue past this month into years to come. As you might have noticed there was very little new material added for about a decade. That ended right on the 20th anniversary of our site. But we have been slower than we intended in adding new and interesting material. Of course, we did add a whole book and the video of John Cobb, and these constitute a foretaste what is to come.

We have contacted several authors who will soon be uploading materials they have written. In addition, the video files and audio files will increase both through our own site and through links to other organizations we admire and respect.

For those of you who do write and who believe your material could be shared through our site we encourage you to communicate directly with me to see if what you have produced can be uploaded to this long established instrument.

We hope to expand our sections of religions other than Christianity. We do have a couple of very good articles on Islam and Buddhism, but we want to greatly expand on that in order to live up to our name of "religion" (meaning several types of religion) on line.

Do return often to our site, and seriously consider providing us ideas of what else might improve this site.

Ignacio Castuera

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Twentieth Anniversary

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the birth of Religion Online we are proud to share David P. Polk's God of Empowering Love: A History and Reconception of the Theodicy Conundrum. Polk holds a PhD from Claremont and served his denomination, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in a variety of roles. In retirement he has produced a most important piece on the always difficult problem of evil in light of the power of God. Dr. Polk reconceives the basic question of the relation of power and goodness by asking what kind of power is appropriate to a loving God, rather than the traditional way of framing the issue as how can a powerful God also be a loving God.

We also move from the printed word to include video and audio presentations which will be added during this anniversary period. We have been given permission to upload audio-visual materials from the Center for Process Studies and will be asking for other organizations to allow us into their files as well.

William Fore's vision will remain in focus. No one will be charged for accessing materials in this site. All seekers, scholars and practitioners are encouraged to help us celebrate the anniversary by increasing the use of this valuable tool.

We kindly request feedback so we can improve on the great idea that led Bill Fore to create Religion Online.

Ignacio Castuera

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Religion Online Redesign

We're very excited to announce that we've recently updated our servers and redesigned our website. Religion Online has been a valuable resource for millions of people over the past two decades. When it was originally launched back in 1997, the site utilized then-current technologies that worked well and provided a consistent and reliable end-user experience. Our desire with this upgrade was to build on its strengths and expand our capabilities by utilizing a modern content management system, implementing current web standards, and improving the user interface.  Our goal was thus to continue to provide our visitors with all the same compelling content, but to put in place the necessary mechanisms for growth in a contemporary context--that is, to expand the functionality of the server, to increase the types of content we can provide, and to provide an experience that is consistent across all devices and platforms.

We know we still have a long way to go to realize these objectives, but we're committed to continually improving. We hope you'll agree that this is a significant step in the right direction.  Please don't hesitate to let us know how we're doing.