Catholic Q&A by Fr Ray Ryland

Supplementary resources

The following resources may be freely browsed, read, or searched. Catholic Q & A is featured at catholicquestions.org. There you will find links to the Amazon point of purchase ($9.99 U.S.) and the international indexing prize accorded to this ebook.

In Father Ray's book, input "Chesterton" into the search box. You will see instantly that he refers to G.K. Chesterton in four paragraphs in his book. Questions are numbered in order of publication, from one up to 741. The second small number after the question number is the paragraph number within that question. Again, if you search on "Aquinas" you will find references in paragraphs 108.1 - 108.2, 68.3, and 271.1.

In addition to searching, you may also browse and read in all the other resources listed below.

The power of the search shows up in "inexact phrases". All search engines can find exact phrases. But sometimes other words may come in between. That they may be one and that they may all be one both are found with the MarpX search engine.

The other major difference is in relevance ranking. All of us, whether speaking or writing, convey meaning by putting words in relationship with one another. Words far apart (except in headings) don't mean much. Our approach is to show at the top of the list the hits in which the words are closest together. The further down the list you go, the further apart are the words; the score shows a growing number of waste words, that is, words you didn't ask for. In other words, the hits most likely to be meaningful show up early in the list of hits. There's no need to dig through hits in which words are far apart and meaningless.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is in copyright-protected form. In copyright-protected search results, you are shown headings, section numbers, and the words that you type in. The letters in all the other words are replaced by the letter 'x'. You will need either a print copy or an ebook version to see the full content. You may purchase the Catechism from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Enjoy!

Douglas Lowry
Professor of Business and Marketing (ret.)
Franciscan University of Steubenville