Pearl Barros (Religious Studies) was invited to contribute a sermon to Catholic Women Preach honoring the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In her sermon, she reflects on the “dangerous memory of Mary”—one that “challenges depictions of Mary’s life that attempt to neutralize its radical implications for pushing against injustice and its call to stand in compassionate solidarity with all who suffer.”

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Well, it may not be New England, but fall colors are here in Santa Clara, as well as a little nip in the morning air. I hope that you had a restorative holiday break as we gear up for the homestretch into the end of Fall Quarter.

I know we are all living with a lot of uncertainty, given the huge spikes in COVID-19 infections — when will there be a vaccine, how much can we do in the meantime, what does this mean for the holidays and our teaching in winter? I'm sorry I don't have the answers, though it really does look like there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even if we have some more hardship to endure until we emerge. And so I applaud all of your dedication, hard work, creativity, resilience and resolve. Every day, I am struck by how much the College of Arts and Sciences community believes in our university and common purpose. Though it may not feel like it right now, my instinct tells me that we are building new bonds of care and new ways of working together. I feel these will serve us well when COVID-19 is behind us.

As we wrap up this quarter, I invite you to join the University for one of our final events of the year tomorrow evening - the Festival of Lights - featuring the Santa Clara University Choirs with special guests Rhiannon Giddens and SCU alumni from around the world. In the meantime, join me in celebrating the wonderful, continued activities of our faculty, staff, students, and alumni that are highlighted below.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

This quarter the Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministries (GPPM) held a four-part series on Building Intercultural Competencies for Ministers designed to introduce educators, ministers, and pastoral leaders to basic awareness and understanding of cultural diversity. The sessions work to identify unconscious bias and develop skills to equip ministers for the integration of faith and culture for all ages and cultural backgrounds. The learning models included these goals:

• Framing issues of diversity theologically in terms of the Church’s mission to all.
• Seeking an understanding of culture and how it works.
• Developing intercultural communication skills in diverse settings.
• Expanding knowledge of the obstacles that impede effective intercultural relations.
• Fostering integration rather than assimilation in Church settings, with a spirituality of hospitality, cultural humility, reconciliation, and mission.

The series was led by Fr. James Okafor of the Diocese of San José; Jennifer Merritt, Ph.D., the Director of Community-based Learning at the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education and an adjunct quarterly lecturer in the Child Studies Program; Roselynn Pucan-Meagor, Pastoral Ministries MA ’20, MPA in International Public Administration, the Director of Family Faith Formation at St. Catherine of Alexandria Church in Morgan Hill; and José Vicente Gonzalez, Ph.D., Director of Personnel at Mount Pleasant School District in San José and a Catechist at St. Catherine of Alexandria.

Di Di (Sociology) recently published an article, titled, “Gendered Paths to Enlightenment: The Intersection of Gender and Religion in Buddhist Temples in Mainland China and the United States,” in Social Currents. This study explores how religious adherents construct their ideas regarding gender in Buddhist faith communities. Two temples, one in China and the other in the United States, are situated in national contexts that endorse different macro-level gender norms. While leaders of both temples teach similar religious gender norms—specifically, that gender is unimportant for spiritual advancement—adherents do articulate gender differences in other respects. Buddhists at the temple in China believe that men and women differ but should be treated equally, with neither holding dominance over the other; meanwhile, U.S. practitioners also believe that everyone should be treated equally irrespective of gender, but they view men and women as essentially the same. Analysis reveals that Buddhists at both temples recognize the distinctions between their religious and societal macro-level gender norms and navigate between these norms when constructing their own understandings of gender. This study highlights the influence of national context on the relationship between gender and religion, thereby contributing to and deepening our understanding of the subject.  

Cruz Medina (English) presented as a featured session at the 2020 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) virtual conference on Thursday, November 19. His talk "Rascuache Technology Pedagogy: Making Do With a Confluence of Resources" discussed teaching with technology using whatever software and apps that students and teachers have access to. His talk addressed issues of rigor, the writing process, and working within curricular constraints of departments, programs, and institutions. Cruz has served as a co-chair of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus since 2016.

Laura Callahan (Modern Languages & Literatures) published an article co-authored with Adriana Díaz (University of Queensland) titled "Intercultural communicative competence and Spanish heritage language speakers: an overview from the U.S., Australia and Europe" in the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 7-2, published online November 25, 2020.

Iris Stewart-Frey (Environmental Studies & Sciences), together with coauthors Genevieve Clow '18 (Environmental Science and Chemistry), Anne Graham '19 (Environmental Science) and Chris Bacon (Environmental Studies & Sciences), recently published a paper on “Disparate air quality impacts from roadway emissions on schools in Santa Clara County (CA)”

The authors used GIS to ask whether the exposure to high concentrations of vehicle exhaust is equally distributed for schools in Santa Clara County (SCC). Car exhaust is linked to many negative health outcomes such as asthma and heart and lung diseases. Results from the study suggest that schools in SCC are exposed to high levels of air pollution from roadways at a rate that is higher than the national average. At the same time, students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and receiving aid are more likely to be educated in schools with elevated levels. The authors propose mitigation strategies to reduce the risk of exposure to car exhaust for school children. The work was supported by the Mapping Health Initiative funded by the DeNardo foundation. Genevieve won a highly competitive NASA Develop fellowship and is now beginning graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she will work on remotely sensing the distribution of phytoplankton, the largest contributor to ocean productivity. Anne currently serves as an AmeriCorps fellow in environmental education at UC Davis’ Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

Photo: Left: Genevieve Clow, right: Anne Graham.

David Keaton's (English) western novel Pig Iron, originally published in 2015, was recently re-released in a special limited edition hardcover through Thunderstorm Books. The novel, a postmodern take on the traditional gunslinging western, was also optioned for film.

On November 23, Nancy Unger (History) gave an illustrated presentation “Researching and Teaching LGBTQ History: Why it Matters,” to 250+ employees of Proquest (a full-text database provider), emphasizing both the importance of that history and the importance of digitized primary sources, especially in the time of Covid-19.

Photo: Image of demonstration prior to this summer's Supreme Court's ruling protecting LGBTQ workers from discrimination.

For the Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender, ed. Justine Howe, Mary Elaine Hegland (Professor Emerita, Anthropology) published a chapter based on her research about Iranian elderly in "Aliabad," Iran and in the Santa Clara Valley: "Aging and the Elderly: Diminishing Family Care Systems and Need for Alternative." Iranian elderly, even more than those in most other Muslim societies, are facing challenges. Modernization, globalization, and oil money enabled an expanding middle class, with daughters-in-law no longer willing to care for mothers-in-law. In the recent past, many elderly women especially were non-literate and didn't have opportunities to develop hobbies. At home alone, they have often been lonely and lacked sufficient care. Now, with the terrible economic conditions from sanctions and internal mismanagement and corruption, all the more, families need supplementary programs to care for elderly widows.

Mary has found zoom and phone useful for continuing her work. Several highly-publicized "honor" killings have taken place in Iran, although they are much more common in other countries. Mary organized and moderated a zoom panel discussion on "Honour Killing: Culture, Law, Theory" on August 15. She was able to provide a zoom slide lecture on "Iranian Village Life in the 1970s" in Persian for an Iranian-American seniors group. Phone interviews enabled Mary to write an article, to be published soon, about the results of child marriages, sadly, still common in Iran.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar