Dear ISSR Member, We are pleased to circulate the following message: Major new research institute at Campion Hall The Jesuits in Britain are pleased to announce that a new research institute called the Laudato Si’ Institute (LSI) is being established at Campion Hall, the Jesuit permanent private hall of the University of Oxford. The LSI will be established during the academic year 2018-2019 and will formally open in September 2019. The aim of the Laudato Si’ Institute is to foster interdisciplinary research arising out of the intellectual challenges presented most vividly in Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’, while being faithful to Ignatian traditions and reflective practice. The premise of Laudato Si’ is that the crumbling of the earth’s fabric, largely through human activity, is ultimately devastating for humanity

  Dear ISSR Member,   As you may know, the new data protection regulation, GDPR, is coming into force on May 25th 2018. It applies to organisations, such as ISSR, that are based in the EU.   To comply with the new regulations, ISSR has sent out an e-mail to its membership in order to obtain consent for continued contact.   As part of these regulations, ISSR also wants to make clear to all Fellows and Associates what their data rights are with respect to knowing:   a) what data ISSR collects on its membership; b) what ISSR does with those data; and c) how to obtain a census of what data ISSR holds on you as a member.   Fortunately, these are straightforward to answer.   a) ISSR holds

ISSR is pleased to announce its new partnership with St Mary-le-Bow church in organising and hosting the prestigious Boyle Lectures for Science and Religion. The first lecture to be held as part of this partnership will be delivered Monday 18th February 2019. This lecture will be delivered by ISSR's President, Professor Michael J. Reiss, and we are delighted to have Professor Janet Soskice as the respondent. ISSR is also pleased to present the transcript for the 2018 Boyle Lecture, which was delivered by ISSR Fellow Dr Mark Harris (University of Edinburgh), with his kind permission, as part of our ISSR blog series. The title of the lecture is: 'Apocalypses Now: Modern Science and Biblical Miracles' The lecture was videoed, and has been posted on YouTube, and on St. Mary-le-Bow's website,

The ISSR CRISPR-Cas9 session held at the AAR Boston event November 2017, organised by ISSR Vice President Ron Cole-Turner, was filmed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. The video of the event can be viewed on the following page: http://www.nationalacademies.org/gene-editing/index.htm   Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance calls for inclusive public discussion and debate about the potential uses of technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 to make changes to human DNA. Engaging diverse viewpoints will be particularly critical to debates about uses that would raise complex societal and ethical issues, such as the creation of heritable genetic changes (also referred to as germline genome editing). With support from NAM's Kellogg Health of the Public Fund, the National Academies were pleased to support a webcast of