Boing boing pointed me to this link to an Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican’s curator of meteorites, from Astrobiology Magazine. Consolmagno divides his time between the Vatican and the research observatory they founded in Arizona as a result of growing light pollution in the Roman sky. The interview occurred at a NASA astrobiology conference in California and, after the interviewer satisfies his predicatble curiosity about what an astronomical researcher might do for the Vatican, turns to speculation about the theological challenge that might be presented by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Reading boing boing‘s blurb, I immediately thought of Mary Doria Russell’s two provocative science fiction novels, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998), about the consequences of the Jesuits’ beating the rest of the world to a first-contact expedition to a newly-discovered extraterrestrial civilization. In fact, the interviewer asks Consolmagno about The Sparrow, and it turns out he wasn’t much taken with it. Russell, by the way, is a reformed paleoanthropologist, raised as a Catholic but a convert to Judaism, according to her website.