Societies
The John Ray Society
is the scientific society of St Catherines College. It was to St Catherines Hall that Ray first went in 1644. Although he had been accepted for Trinity College he was offered a scholarship at St Catherines Hall and for someone of modest means that would have been important. He did not stay there long, transferring to Trinity College a little over two years later. The John Ray Society has a web site on which there is the usual student information and a brief biography of Ray.The Ray Society
is a charity that publishes natural history books. It has issued a number of reproductions of John Ray's work and it keeps his best known theological tract The Wisdom of God in print. It is accessible on-line as an Acrobat file. The book is about God in Nature and there are a lot of references to Ray's field observations, but the scope of this book and Rays' other theological works is more obviously relevant to the third society named for Ray. The Ray Society has a web page that lists its current titles.The John Ray Initiative
Its statement of objectives begins:The John Ray Initiative (JRI) is an educational charity with a vision to bring together scientific and Christian understandings of the environment in a way that can be widely communicated and lead to effective action. It was formed in 1997 in recognition of the urgent need to respond to the global environmental crisis and the challenges of sustainable development and environmental stewardship.
John Ray was reticent about his religious beliefs in the doctrinal sense but is generally thought to have had puritanical leanings. (There is a learned treatise that claims that Ray was not a dissenter.) Creationists will find The Wisdom of God comforting but there can be little doubt that Ray would have been a Darwinist, since he believed in demonstrable facts. Many regard Ray's work as the start of the Theory of Evolution.
The life of Ray according to JRI is a useful brief account.