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Vince Lyons’ own personal faith journey has brought him into a deeper understanding of Catholicism and that is something he does not shy away from when he is teaching biology.
“The Theology of the faith should be permeating everything we’re doing,” he said. “I try to see Christ in, under, and through everything we do and I think my students know that.”
Dr. Lyons was born into a Catholic family, and even discerned whether or not to study for the priesthood. During college he helped at a Lutheran summer camp and eventually earned a Masters of Divinity from Trinity Lutheran Seminary. Within a year of receiving that degree he rejoined the Catholic church.
The subject of his main paper for the master’s degree was about the origins of the earth, including both science and bible perspectives.
“I brought the two together to help us understand the age of the earth, the existence of God, and other things,” he said. “From a young age, I believed that science and faith have more in common than they do differences but all we heard about was the differences.”
In biology classes, when the content interfaces with an aspect of the faith, Dr. Lyons is intentional about calling attention to it. For example, in AP Biology the seniors were learning about mitosis and the experimentation of determining traits in fruit flies and mice.
“That gave me a chance to talk about why we don’t experiment with humans and the ethics and morality of why we wouldn’t do that from a faith perspective,” he said.
Another recent classroom example is a student’s presentation about Down syndrome which included the information that some doctors recommend ending the pregnancy when Down syndrome is detected.
“We talked about how in some countries if Down syndrome is detected, the mother has to abort the child and some doctors here recommend the same,” he said. “We’re constantly talking to kids to try to get them to understand that every human life is valuable. We can talk about those things and have those difficult conversations and not worry about it not fitting with what pop culture is saying. We don’t think twice about it. We just say we’re valuing human life.
“Biology can be an extremely stale subject to study but when you bring the faith aspect into it, it garners a certain interest from kids that just strictly anatomy and physiology doesn’t accomplish,” he said. “I do everything in my power to make kids aware of a well-rounded perspective of what they’re learning. There’s what is in the textbook but also what’s out in the world. Biology is the perfect fertile ground for those discussions.”
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