The Gideons are on campus today, like every Fall, handing out copies of the New Testament. While I leave it to others to debate the place of such an activity on a US public university campus, I thought I’d relate a conversation I had with a gentleman just outside my parking deck this morning. Me: Are there female members of the Gideons? Him: Yes, there’s a women’s auxiliary. Me: I ask because I’ve never seen women handing out New Testaments […]
Have you seen this new Pew Foundation survey on being Jewish in America? Like all surveys it raises some interesting questions, such as whether it simply describes an already existing object of study (one that nicely divides into a variety of easily and clearly distinguishable sub-types) or whether the questions, categories, and sub-divisions actively constitute an object of study. What’s more, who is doing that constitution: group members themselves or the people who study them? For a survey such as […]
Several of our students and faculty members were at the College of Arts & Sciences’ tent this past Saturday for Homecoming, when Departments are invited to staff a table or two for a few hours and do something creative for fans and alumni attending the football game. There’s face painting and beanbag games, lots of candy and performances by students from the School of Music. While we can’t compete with the huge snakes that the Department of Biology always brings, […]
So, did you catch that Prof. Altman‘s recent post on Mircea Eliade (which was linked here) was just quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Maybe you’ve seen Sullivan on TV as a political commentator or maybe you follow his blog — he’s certainly got a national media profile. But did you read Mike’s original post? If so, what do you think of the particular quote from it that appeared on The Dish? Is this what Mike’s article was about…? Was it […]
Have you heard of FOX News host, Bill O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Jesus: A History? Seen the “60 Minutes” interview? […]
There’s been lots of buzz, over the past decade or so, about material religion or embodied religion, as if this apparent emphasis on the empirical, the contingent, the historical, somehow gets us out of what many now see as the old rut of studying disembodied beliefs alone. […]
Did you see this article? The gist of it is: It’s worth reading, and thinking about the various factors that can inform the decision on an undergraduate major and whether to pursue graduate studies. Thanks to REL grad Chris Scott for bringing it to my attention. […]
Seen this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education? Give it a read and ask yourself why — if this is what the public actually thinks — we all seem to assume that there’s a crisis in the liberal arts? That is, if the skills taught all across the liberal arts are so essential (read the results [PDF] of the study for yourself) then why do we all seem to agree so easily that they are so non-essential — i.e., […]
Read More from “The Stories of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated…”
Did you see this article in the New York Times‘ “Common Sense” column? A lot of people now seem to be measuring the worth of their investment in higher education in terms of the possibility of future earnings — their “return on investment.” But what would happen if the return that concerned you was something else that’s empirically measurable and that’s likely pretty relevant to people too, something like, say, life expectancy? After all, earning potential is a speculative generalization […]
Ladies (ok, gents too, I guess): how do you define “lucrative”? Give the story a listen. […]