As you’re probably aware, our structures here are complicated and overlapping in many ways. We’re the University Parish of Christ Sun of Justice. We’re the Chapel + Cultural Center. We support the RPI Chaplains Office, and we’re supported by the Rensselaer Newman Foundation. Our principal student organizations are the Newman Catholic Fellowship and the Knights of Columbus council. It was quite a challenge figuring out how to fit all that into one coherent web site!
Our design for the site is intended to help site visitors (especially students, their parents, prospective students, and others) find the most pertinent information about us, and suggest ways they can engage with our community. All the structural elements of our ministries are there, but the design and navigation are built to help site visitors, not to reflect our organizational structures.
One issue came up early in the process: what should our web address be? Chapelandculturalcenter.net wasn’t great, because we’re a lot more than our C+CC home. The old address also didn’t connect us to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and it ended with a .net, which is not intuitive. We had to avoid a name that included “RPI” in order to respect the Institute’s trademark. While I didn’t want to avoid the word “Catholic,” our ministries here are much broader than just “to the Catholics.” Rensselaernewman.org seemed to fit the bill, since “Newman” references St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, the 19th Century cleric at Oxford who inspires so much of today’s campus ministry. The name also acknowledges the Rensselaer Newman Foundation, without overshadowing the diverse ministries here.
Over time the site will continue to grow. We’ll import a lot of the archival information from the old site, so that it’s available a searchable. I’m aware that we also need to further expand the parish sections of the site to provide information beyond the basics we have now. You can help by sharing links from the web site to your personal social media accounts– help us spread the word!