an article about Goodlands<\/a>, a company founded and directed by Molly Burhans. She and her team are assembling a huge, on-line map of the land holdings of the Catholic Church, a massive challenge in itself. But they\u2019re also layering information about the church administration by diocese as well as up-to-date information about climate change. It\u2019s been a difficult road so far. She\u2019s depended on charitable donations — including software and, at points, accommodation — to keep going. She has had several very encouraging meetings at the Vatican, although the extent of the Church\u2019s commitment to the project is not entirely clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMolly is still in her twenties. With strong interests and educational credentials in both computer science and land management, she is also a committed Catholic. She hadn\u2019t really understood her own convictions very well until she met Guatemalan Catholics whose faith included convictions about the way land ought to be used to reduce poverty and improve lives. \u201cThey were Christians,\u201d she said, \u201cbut not like the Christians you see on TV–none of the prosperity gospel crap…in fact, exactly the opposite. I began to think, maybe I\u2019m a Christian\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Catholic Church is among the largest landowners in the world, with a population of roughly 1.2 billion. Some of the land records are so out of date as to be unusable, and there is no policy for maintenance or use. Molly wants the Church to take on the huge, but in her view absolutely critical task of managing its land humanely. \u201cWhat if desecration of the environment were a mortal sin?\u201d she wonders, \u201cCould faith accomplish what science and politics have not?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maybe we\u2019re all searching for good news these days, whether consciously or not, but I thought this was so good on so many levels that I wanted to, well, just vote \u201cyes,\u201d I guess,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"Catholic Faith and Land Management","bgseo_description":"Goodlands, a company founded by Molly Burhans, is compiling a map of the land holdings of the Catholic Church worldwide, intended as a tool to combine Catholic faith with land management. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[189],"tags":[420,421,422],"class_list":["post-2252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aesthetics","tag-good-news","tag-goodlands","tag-molly-burhans"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2252"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2257,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252\/revisions\/2257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}