It manifests very much in certain situations.  For example, I tend to “get Buddhist” when I lose things.  Impermanence man.  And usually I can let things go that way.  However, this year for the first time I lost something that no amount of Buddhist rationalizing could temper the sense of loss I was feeling.  The object that was lost: a fake fur stole.  Now this was a fake fur mass that one drapes around one’s neck and it creates a luxurious fur collar.  It made me feel about 75 years old and glamorous.  In short, I loved it.  But anyway, I mistakenly took this fur stole out with me to a show on a Friday night.  A tip for all Bates students: don’t bring anything you like out with you on a weekend night.  It will be gone.  And you will be sad.  Like I was when I couldn’t find my fur stole after the show.  I lamented the entire night and into the morning.  When I woke up still depressed, I decided a simple acceptance of impermanence wouldn’t cut it.  Buddhism wasn’t enough.  I needed to feel the sweet warmth of that stole around my neck, not find the Middle Way.  So I hopped in my car to drive over to the place where the concert was held for maybe it wasn’t stolen and I would find it and could move on with my life.  As I was driving there, I saw a mass of fur by the side of the road.  It was my stole!  I can’t tell you how happy I was!  I leapt out of the car and put it immediately around my neck.  It smelled a bit as I had just taken it off the ground and it had been outside all night but it was my stole.  It was great. [More...]

Just some friends on Frye St outside a campus house

I am just getting back into blogging after a wild start to my senior year. My academic course load is really challenging this semester, but I am really happy with all of my classes. For instance, though I am a Religion major and a Philosophy minor, I registered to take an upper level History seminar on colonial America. It is a subject I wasn’t at all interested in or knew anything about. But all my friends who are History majors told me that Professor Hall was an amazing teacher. Though he was teaching a 100 level class this semester, I decided to take his 300 level seminar with only six other students. There has been tons of reading and writing assignments, but I have fallen in love with the material and the professor. That’s something special about Bates and the liberal arts experience. You don’t have to limit yourself to classes within your major, or even personal interests. And when you take classes outside of your realm of knowledge, why not sign up for the more demanding and smaller classes?

Enough about academics, let’s get to the good stuff. Coming from Kentucky, my parents and friends back home always ask me about the weather. Let’s get something clear: yes, the winters are cold. But the campus looks amazing with the changing seasons. With lots of rain this summer, the leaves are going through an amazing transformation this fall. 

-Graham

Check out these pictures some of my friends have been taking of areas on or just around the campus. These aren’t professional photos from admissions. These are really just some shots my buddies happened to snap this past week.

Ben messing around and doing some rock climbing this past weekend

Anne having a good time and sharing a laugh on the quad

Great shot of the leaves changing at a cemetery just a short walk from campus

Stephanie Kelley-Romano

While doing graduate work at the University of Kansas in the 1990s, Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano got hooked on The X-Files, so much so that the TV show’s organizing myth, a belief in alien abduction, gave Kelley-Romano her dissertation topic.

Published in 2006, “Mythmaking in Alien Abduction Narratives” drew from her 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. Collectively, she says, the stories represent an evolving myth similar to a religion.

What intrigued you about alien abduction stories?

I’ve always been interested in rhetoric around sudden and dramatic changes. How do you wake up one day and think you’ve been abducted by aliens? Or how do you wake up and think the Lord Jesus Christ has saved you?

Read more of the Stephanie Kelley-Romano interview.

Was it hard to find people who believe they’ve been abducted?

They are everywhere. A 1992 Roper poll suggested that 3.7 million Americans believe they’ve been abducted. Several Bates people have come by for my card because they have a relative who thinks they’ve been abducted.

So how is someone’s belief that they’ve been abducted like a religion?

In the narratives, you see people using their experience like a religion: for self-guidance on how to live or to achieve a sense of unity and transcendence. For example, if a person talks about being abducted because of their intelligence, that gives a sense of empowerment. Or if the narrative talks about extraterrestrials visiting Earth to help integrate humanity into the larger cosmic community, that puts the myth into the realm of religious communion.

You also argue that abduction narratives reflect fears about race and technology.

In many narratives, aliens that are gray — the mixture of black and white — occupy a lower status than aliens typically described as having nearly Nordic features. The gray aliens are often on Earth to start a hybrid race that can’t survive without nurturing from humans, because the aliens are overly reliant on technology and can’t nurture life. Alien narratives allow nonbelievers to talk about these issues too — isn’t it interesting that the top-grossing films of all time have to do with aliens or extraterrestrials?

What is your teaching approach?

Back at Kansas, I lectured, telling them a lot of things. Now I don’t lecture so much. In upper-level courses especially, I bring it to them: “What do you think?” While I believe that alien abduction is very much like a religion, I do not want to convince 15 students of that.
I want them to convince me otherwise.

But have we lost something when professors don’t lecture as often?

Definitely. I’m all for collaborative learning, but that combined with cultural relativism can be a train wreck. The bottom line is that I know a lot more about rhetoric than my students do. It’s my obligation to tell some of what I know in a way that models competence and excitement.

The study of rhetoric delves into political and social criticism — hot topics. How do you maintain a sense of fair play in the classroom?

In my classes, you can claim anything you want and if you can prove it, you will do well. If you can’t, you won’t. Some students get freaked out by that. They say, “Well, I feel that….” And I say, “I don’t care much about what you feel. I care what you can prove.” So even though I’m a hippy-dippy liberal feminist who researches alien abduction, I tend to have a conservative following. Conservative students know that in my classes, regardless of the topic, they are absolutely, positively safe.

You also bring students into your research.

After Victoria Westgate ’06 wrote her senior thesis on political cartoons and Hurricane Katrina, she and I co-authored “Drawing Disaster” in The Texas Speech Communication Journal and “Blaming Bush” in Journalism Studies. Nate Kellogg ’09 and I are writing on the Duke lacrosse case and the coverage in the school newspaper, The Chronicle.

Read any good books?

Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, a study that includes captivity narratives. Everything from slave narratives to alien abduction narratives can be looked at through a similar rhetorical lens.

What’s compelling about the current presidential primary season?

I get excited about having 18-year-old students who don’t yet understand the symbolic functions of conventions or presidential speeches. They think the inaugural address is stupid. Some of this is due to the self-reflexity of shows like The Daily Show, which have exposed the deliberateness of political campaigns and the presidency. So our little happy myth that presidents run because they’re called has been shattered, and the office secularized and debased. What steps in to fill that void is another myth: That we are somehow smarter than people were 20 years ago. And I don’t think that’s true.

]]> http://www.bates.edu/news/2008/05/11/ask-me-another-2/feed/ 0 http://www.bates.edu/news/2008/03/27/belief-in-et-abduction-isnt-alien-says-kelley-romano/ http://www.bates.edu/news/2008/03/27/belief-in-et-abduction-isnt-alien-says-kelley-romano/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:35:08 +0000 Bates News http://batesthisweek.wordpress.com/?p=853

Stephanie Kelley-Romano

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano has interviewed many people whose deeply held personal beliefs help give meaning to their lives.

And, by the way, these people think they were once abducted by aliens.

In 2006, Kelley-Romano published her Ph.D. thesis, “Mythmaking in Alien Abduction Narratives,” in which she drew from 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

One of her conclusions is that people who believe they’ve been abducted have woven a collective myth that acts as a kind of religion. [More...]

Wertheim received a Templeton Science and Religion Book Award for “Pythagoras’ Trousers,” which traces the history of the relationship between physics, religion and women. She also wrote “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,” which explores the religious connotations of cyberspace, and “Faith and Reason,” a one-hour PBS documentary that includes exclusive coverage of a recent Vatican conference on evolution.

Trained as a scientist with degrees in physics, mathematics and computer science, Wertheim has worked for 15 years as a science writer and commentator dedicated to making science accessible to the general public. Her articles have appeared in “New Scientist,” “Omni,” “Australian Geographic,” “Vogue” and “Glamour.”

Next in the Religion, Science and Public Policy Lecture Series at Bates will be Robert Russell, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Theology and Science, on “Science and the Spiritual Quest” March 26 at 7:30 p.m. in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

Foerst, who will discuss the religious and psychological implications of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, believes a mechanistic anthropology can coexist with human values such as dignity and compassion.

“If we are able to rebuild ourselves, does that mean that we are nothing but machines? Can we respect something we can completely analyze and understand? And how might we end up treating our artificial counterparts?” asks Foerst, author of the forthcoming book “God and Computers: Myths of Artificial Intelligence and Their Epistemological Implications” (MIT Press, Cambridge).

Foerst is a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate at the Center for the Studies of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

The public is invited to attend free of charge.

The symposium will explore the Bible from literary, historical and religious perspectives. Conference organizers Robert Allison and Michael Caspi, both professors of religion, approached colleagues at many of Maine’s institutions of higher education where religion and literature are taught.

“We do have a problem nationwide where biblical scholars tend to discuss their findings with each other, but the public at large remains absent. We haven’t had a chance to explain what we’re doing.” Allison said.

By sharing their work with the public, the assembled Maine academics hope to demonstrate, according to Allison, “a sense of our obligation as scholars to the community around us to share some of our work, and to give the public a chance to question us.”

The conference will commence on Nov. 1 at 3:30 p.m., in the Benjamin E. Mays Center, with greeting remarks from President Donald W. Harward and Martha Crunkleton, dean of the faculty. The keynote address follows at 4 p.m., delivered by Susan Ackerman, associate professor of religion at Dartmouth, who will speak on Wine, Women and Song: Female Musicianship and the Vineyard Festivals of Ancient Israel.

A specialist in ancient near-Eastern history and religion, with particular focus on the relationships between the Israelite religion and religions of Israel’s neighbors, Ackerman is the author of Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (1992) and the forthcoming Warrior, Dancer, Seductress and Queen: Women in Judges and in Biblical Israel. She received her Ph.D from Harvard.

Following Ackerman’s lecture, Caspi will discuss The Narrative of Genesis 22 in Three Editions, in the Benjamin E. Mays Center at 5:15 p.m.

Sessions for the second and third days of the conference, Nov. 2 and 3, will be held in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

The Nov. 2 schedule of presentations, beginning at 9 a.m., includes:

• 9:15 a.m. – Frank K. Carner, professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, on Justice, Poetic Justice and the Resolution of Biblical Plots.
• 10:15 a.m. – Thomas R.W. Longstaff, Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies at Colby, on Sepphoris: The Ornament of the Galilee.
• 11:15 a.m. – Ann Johnston, professor of theological and religious studies at Bangor Theological Seminary, on The Isaiah Apocalypse: Vision of the Triumph of God.
• 2 p.m. – William Sayres, professor of literature at the University of Southern Maine, on Providence and Gratitude in ‘Persuasion’.
• 3 p.m. – Robert Allison, associate professor of religion at Bates and chair of Classical and Medieval Studies, on Images of light and Imagery of Ingestion: The Mysticism of the Gospel of Thomas.
• 4 p.m. – Burke O. Long, professor of religion at Bowdoin, on Scenery of Eternity: W.F. Albright and Ideas of ‘Holy Land’.
• 7 p.m. – A screening of Cecil B. DeMille’s film classic Samson and Delilah will be held in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, followed by commentary and discussion led by Irena Makarushka, associate professor of religion and department chair at Bowdoin.

The conference’s closing sessions, beginning at 9 a.m. on Nov. 3 include:

• 9:15 a.m. – John R. Wilson, professor of literature at the University of Maine, Orono, on Change the ‘The’ to ‘A’.
• 10.15 a.m. – Becky Kasper, professor of American religious history at St. Joseph’s College, on Old Testament History and the Problems of Biblical Theology.

To encourage dialogue, each scholarly presentation will be followed by questions from the audience. Conference programs have been distributed to local churches, synagogues and high schools.

Bates intends to host two additional symposia of Maine-area scholars in 1997, including Maine Remembers the Holocaust, in the spring, and God With the People, God and the People: An Interfaith Symposium, in the fall.