On the flight home from a visit to Lehigh University this past week I started reading Steven Johnson’s engaging How We Got to Now (2014) — a popularly-written book on the conditions and unanticipated connections that helped to make possible the innovations that many of us now take for granted (e.g., public sanitation or refrigeration). […]
Month: October 2014
Is This Really a College Town?
The label “college town” can produce a variety of expectations. Having spent several years attending UNC Chapel Hill, my expectations of a college town derive from some specific observations. When I traveled to Ithaca, New York, at the end of September to participate in Cornell University’s South Asia Program Seminar, the plane trip heightened my expectations for a thriving college town, with a professor sitting beside me and another seated in front of me, and someone reading a journal article […]
ar·ti·facts with Prof. Finnegan
The third video in our second season of ar·ti·facts has just hit the big screen! This video features Dr. Finnegan and her not-so-foreign and not-so-functional clock. ar·ti·facts: A Different Place and Time with Prof. Eleanor Finnegan from UA Religious Studies. […]
The Category Religion — Twenty Years Later
I’ve got a review essay coming out in 2015 in Numen (issue 62/1) that I just proofed. It’s on recent works concerned with the category religion. It was interesting to write, since it’s been twenty years since I wrote a similar essay on the category religion in scholarship. […]
Create Your Own Identity
On Oct. 23, a “hatchet-wielding” man attacked and wounded several police officers in New York City (Queens). Naturally, media outlets immediately started speculating about what could have prompted this man to carry out such a horrific attack. According to several accounts, the man was a recent convert to Islam who had “self-radicalized.” The New York Times headline reads: The article goes on to paint a portrait of this lone wolf who was “self-directed in his activities”: […]
Non-Canonical Capers, Part 2
Each Monday a new episode from the adventures of the Praxis Squad will be posted. […]
Where Are They Now? #16
Matt Groening, B.A. (Evergreen State College, 1977) D’oh! […]
#LoungeTweets: The Be Sure To Feed Your Garden Gnomes Edition
On Wednesday, Prof. Michael Altman was the first faculty member to take part in Live Tweets from the Lounge. It was a riveting hour of Twitter exchanges. Rumor has it that faculty are now fighting over who gets to hang out in the lounge next. Stay tuned for more details. […]
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Where Are They Now? #64
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and former Classics major (Brown University, expelled when on suspension and found to be living with his girlfriend). Ever read the famous letter his father wrote to him when he was 18? Click the opening, below, to read it all. […]
Voting is over: McCutcheon Says It’s @McCutcheonSays
(The official soundtrack to this post.) Thanks to everyone who voted. After all the votes were counted and the local board of elections argued over hanging chads, we have dubbed a winner. You can now find Dr. Russell Mccutcheon on Twitter at @McCutcheonSays. So know your role and tweet at him. Follow @McCutcheonSays // […]
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