Today was a revealing day. We’re currently in the process of a major work of collaboration within our groups, and we performed 5-7 minutes of excerpts from what will soon be performed as 25-30 minute plays for our final productions. The public will be invited, so come one, come all! Here is the facebook …
Category Archives: Courses
Week two wasn’t too weak
‘Twas a productive week. It was a marathon of scenes, monologues, and choreopoem collaborations. We read many examples and excerpts from plays and poems and then spent the week writing and revising our own. The magic seeps through in the revisions, so we’ve been told. Idris tells us “The performance writer writes in real time. He/she …
Disney is My Religion
Last night we read “The Happiest Place on Earth: Disney’s America and the Commodification of Religion,” (Mazur and Koda). It argues that for many Americans, salvation is a commodity. Disney is competing with religion by offering the same products: “mythologies, symbols, rituals, and notions of community by which consumers organize their lives.” Disney provides lessons …
My Sunday at Grace Baptist
One of our assignments is to attend a church (or other religious congregation) of our choice for the duration of the block. One of the churches that our professor said could be interesting was Grace Baptist Church, a fundamental church that interprets the King James’s Bible literally. This is the one I chose. I knew …
Schoolin’ the Middle Schoolers with Poetry
The first week of Idris Goodwin’s class, Writing for Performance – Watch the Clock, was a creative week of performance poetry. This is my second class with good ol’ Goodwin (good young Goodwin, rather), and has already become one of the most bonded groups of students I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time with …
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Civil Religion in America
Today in class we debated whether or not there is a civil religion in America. Again, we used Durkheim’s definition of a religion: a unifying set of practices. We discussed the rituals we participate in (like voting or saying the pledge of allegiance) that reinforce American’s shared value system rooted in democracy. We talked about …
Debutante Balls: A Religious Experience
Last Wednesday I handed in my senior thesis, “A Sociological Study of Debutantes.” Sociology of Religion started the following Monday and it was my first class since before Thanksgiving break. I was excited to finally be able to forget about my thesis. I should have known that it wouldn’t be that easy to forget. Our …
The final stretch…
We’ve moved on from atmospheric physics to atmospheric chemistry, and have spent our time looking at different constituents of our atmosphere and how they get there. One interesting (and complicated) reaction we have focused on is ozone formation and depletion in various layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, the second layer of the atmosphere, …
Balloon Madness
Reviews are in. Pictures are loaded. Results: weather is looking beautiful to put it lightly (if indicative of a changing climate). Weather balloons are a critical to our understanding of the structure and behavior of the atmosphere. Without the twice daily weather balloon launches which take place simultaneously at over 800 sites around the world, we would not …
Homer At First Glance
The first few days of this class were absolutely nothing like what I expected. I signed up because I’d been flirting with the idea of majoring in classics, and loving classical mythology is the reason I started taking Latin in the first place, so a class structured around the study of homeric epics sounded right …
