Salvete!
As development and thought have continued here for Torch & Lily, I think I have settled into what this platform is truly meant to be.
Initially, the idea was that I alone would work on providing and curating a clean, verified set of data — from one Catholic developer to others. However, as I’ve gone on finalizing things and trying to settle into a proper “release,” something was nagging at me that it wasn’t quite how it should be.
As I continued to sit with that, I thought about the sheer amount of data — prayers, saint bios, books, and more — and how that’s a lot of work for one husband and father to really be able to dedicate time towards if this is to truly be a successful endeavor.
The Pivot
I considered further what I wanted out of this, and that was simple: the truth of the Catholic tradition should be easily accessible to anyone who wants to delve into the treasures of the Church.
Therefore, I have pivoted the direction of Torch & Lily away from just one lone curator and turned it into a community effort.
Open Data
The data is now accessible via periodic data dumps at github.com/joshx2415/torch-data — if you just want to grab the data and go, it’s yours. Saints, prayers, the Summa, the Douay-Rheims Bible, patristic commentaries, catechisms, and more — all in clean, machine-readable JSON with English column names.
The dumps are updated automatically, so what you find there will always reflect the current state of the archive.
The Scriptorium
In conjunction with the data dumps, I have also built out a means to contribute towards the project — whether that be providing brand new data or editing existing records. We’re calling it the Scriptorium, and it’s open now.
This way, Torch & Lily becomes an open-source project where the faithful are building a treasury for everyone to be able to enjoy the fruits of our tradition.
The API
The Torch API will be there with all its extras and benefits if you prefer a more convenient way of accessing the (hopefully) ever-growing data from Torch & Lily — full-text search, cross-references, liturgical calendar lookups, and more.
The API is currently free, but I want to be transparent: all of my backend infrastructure is on free tiers itself, so there may be paid tiers in the future. These would exist solely to support the API as infrastructure needs increase. I will always maintain a free tier — it would just have properly weighted usage limits imposed.
Thank You
Thank you to anyone who is reading this. Thank you to anyone who contributes. Thank you to anyone who prays for Torch & Lily.
Building this has been fun, and I am excited to begin sharing this with everyone.
A note on the current state of things: Torch & Lily is in what I’m calling alpha. The foundation is solid and the data is real, but we are still actively working through bugs, smoothing rough edges, and building out features. If something isn’t working the way you’d expect — an endpoint returning odd data, a page that looks off, a contribution that didn’t go through — please let us know. Your patience and feedback during this stage mean more than you know.
In Christ,
Josh
S. Dominice, ora pro nobis.