College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 3

Issue 3, 11/27/01

Contents:

Trivia

Virtual Town Hall

Career Coaching

Universalist Movement

Adrienne Asbury

Black Death and Bubonic Plague

NEW BOOK CO-AUTHORED BY PENN STATE SOCIOLOGIST FINDS RELIGION STILL VITAL IN AMERICA

    For members of the Mormon Church, it may be donating two years for missions. For Muslims, turning toward Mecca to praise Allah five times a day may serve as an important reminder of the strength of their faith. Perhaps Jehovah’s Witnesses are strengthened by door-to-door testifying. According to Penn State sociologist Roger Finke and researcher Rodney Stark, Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, the level of a religion’s requirements often reflect the strength of member commitment. Surprisingly, they have found that religions requiring more of their congregants have higher rates of membership growth.
    In 1992, Finke and Stark co-wrote The Churching of America, which examined the growth or decline of the churches in America from 1776-1992. Acts of Faith takes their research one step further to look at how participation in religion causes some churches to flourish and others to struggle.
    In Acts of Faith, they have discovered that, rather than declining, religion today “remains a powerful force.” Additionally, their research suggests that the longer an individual belongs to a church, the more she learns to appreciate and value her religion. Furthermore, churches work best when they provide members not only with a sense of kinship, but also with educational programs, social networks, and a sense of religious obligation.
    Finke and Stark also believe churches which consistently maintain high membership numbers (such as Mormon churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Assemblies of God) are those who strive for high-visibility and active recruitment. As a consequence, the members feel a greater sense of belonging and individual satisfaction.
    Why does this level of demand keep people returning to their temples, mosques, and churches? Finke suggests members may seek solace in a place where they can “recapture old rituals.” Chanting, midnight mass, testifying—these familiar sacraments offer connections with tradition many have been missing. Churches now recognize these needs and work toward a balance between a modern approach and one that still includes earlier customs.

DO YOU KNOW?

In the last issue of LAzine, we asked a bit of a trick question. We wanted to know how many former Deans of Liberal Arts went on to become president of Penn State. The actual answer is none. While Edwin Erle Sparks was charged with developing the place of liberal arts at Penn State, which resulted in the School of Liberal Arts in 1909, he was never its official dean. For a short period after the school’s formation, he was an acting dean, but did so while simultaneously serving as the college’s president. The only person who answered correctly was Cathy Dufour, who also noted that the only Penn State president ever to have been a dean as well was Eric A. Walker.
So, for this issue, we would like to know the following: during what decade did Liberal Arts become the second largest school in the Pennsylvania State College? The individual with the correct answer will receive a prize and, of course, mention in the next LAzine.

ARCHITECT OF THE VIRTUAL TOWN HALL

    This October, Jeff Polizzotto, ’93 history, made the Wall Street Journal. Polizzotto is not an investing whiz. One might say he is an advocate for the proverbial “little guy.”
    Thanks to Polizzotto and the other hi-tech wizards at Columbia, S.C.’s VC3, municipalities across the southeastern United States are turning the last bastion of pencils and carbon paper into citizen-friendly, digital workhorses. Citizens have direct access to their local government through Web sites which allow them to report broken lights and potholes, pay taxes and parking tickets, file grievances, and more.
    Polizzotto and VC3’s work made it into the WSJ because one of their sites, for Conyers, GA, made the top five on a list of around 400 government sites judged by the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology magazine. The only “towns” with better Web presence were New York City and Montgomery County, Md., a D.C. suburb. Conyers did best Chicago and Florida’s infamous Miami-Dade County.
    Says Polizzotto, “Government sites that let people pay taxes, parking tickets, report potholes, air grievances—basically, let citizens communicate with their government more easily and directly—is something we’ve pioneered.”
    Polizzotto is vice president of sales with VC3, and therefore is the one who travels all over the southeastern U.S. speaking about changing the face of local government.
    He credits his history studies for some of his success. “History is the study of people, really,” he says. “Especially in dealing with government, I apply all the lessons learned when I meet with the people who run cities and counties. When I’m before city council, and I see the history of the town, pictures of past mayors on the walls, old maps of the town, it is very interesting. It makes my job fun.”
    Plus, he adds, “it was pretty cool to be in the Wall Street Journal.”

LIBERAL ARTS CAREER COACHING

    Business, government, nonprofit, education, law, psychology, editing—the list of career areas in which Liberal Arts graduates work is expansive. However, many current students are often at a loss to identify a career field or are not even aware of how their liberal arts degree is applicable to a tremendous variety of occupations.
    Only about 20 percent of the 1400 annual graduates from Liberal Arts go on to graduate or professional school after commencement. The rest enter the workforce or join those looking for work, armed with a Penn State diploma and sometimes a tough barrier to break through—if only in their mind. Parents still apply pressure with the question: “What can you do with a liberal arts degree?”
    More and more, the College is utilizing its alumni to help answer that question by providing guidance to undergraduates about possible career paths. The College has sponsored Law career and department-specific events each semester for years, and in early November twenty alumni hosted a College-wide career exploration event that served nearly 200 undergraduate students in one-on-one meetings and workshops.
    We would like to use this new forum to augment the work we do on campus. In the next few issues, we will ask you questions regarding the career world. For now, we’ll start with a broad request: What one piece of advice do you wish you had when you were first seriously job hunting? Is there a hot career resource that you wish you knew about and recommend to soon-to-be-alumni? To reply, click here.

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THE UNIVERSALIST MOVEMENT IN AMERICA

    Since she was a teenager, Ann Lee Bressler, ’73 history, has held an interest in the idea of hell. “I raised the issue with a minister when I was 12,” she says, “but he was more interested in civil rights. He wanted to work in urban areas, and didn’t have a great interest in theology, so he brushed me off.”
    Bressler’s question turned into a calling. After years spent researching the Universalist movement in the United States, her work has had an auspicious debut. The Oxford University Press has published her book, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880.
    In the book, Bressler argues that Universalism began as a radical, community-oriented faith and only later became a “comfortably established” progressive and individualistic one. She distinguishes Universalist values from more liberal Unitarian values, and shows how Universalists adopted and later abandoned Calvinist beliefs.
    She offers a compelling binary to show the difference: “Unitarians believed that man was too good for God to damn anyone. Universalists believed that God was too good to damn anyone.”
    Unitarians and Universalists united in 1961, but in the nineteenth century, they were quite different. Bressler says the Universalists were very progressive socially, but were traditional in religious matters; Universalists stressed the sovereignty of God, whereas Unitarians were moving toward secular humanism.
    Socially, Unitarians were made up of a more educated group centered around Harvard. Universalists tended to be working class. Bressler says, “we think of the Unitarians as prominent in social reform, abolition, and other movements. However, Universalists were present as well in social movements, just not as much in the forefront. Universalists led the fight against capital punishment, and the peace movement to a certain degree.”
    Bressler is an adjunct faculty member at Davidson College. Her next work is a biography of one of the most prominent Universalists, Thomas Whittemore.

ADRIENNE ASBURY

    Adrienne Asbury will earn her English degree in the spring of 2002, with plans to go right into a career in . . . plants. She has long had an interest in flora both wild and domesticated, but her recent experiences at Penn State have convinced her to think more seriously about a career among foliage.
    As a Schreyer Scholar, Asbury had to complete a thesis project to graduate. Her project, writing the history of the conservation group, the ClearWater Conservancy, grew out of an internship she held over the summer of 2001. “I thought I would be able to write the history over the summer,” she says, “but I have over 160 pages of notes and I haven’t really even started.” Thus, ClearWater has become her main focus in her senior year.
    The conservancy is twenty-one years old, and Adrienne says the various involvements of locals working to save their environment are tangled and interesting. She has also worked at area landscape nurseries, learning the retail side of horticulture, and even sees professional horticulture as a possibility. Her experiences inspire her to find a career that will combine her love of writing and of the outdoors. She has already garnered some recognition of her potential, as she received the Tracy Winfree McCourtney Scholarship in Liberal Arts for this year.

ARE BLACK DEATH AND THE BUBONIC PLAGUE THE SAME?

    The terms “black death” and the “bubonic plague” have often been confused. However, a research team headed by Penn State anthropologist James Wood is finding that the diseases may not be as similar as historical and current thought suggests.
    The team is comprised of several Penn State researchers in historical epidemiology, medical geography, and molecular genetics, including doctoral students Sharon DeWitte-Aviña, Rebecca Ferrell, and Stephen Matthews, and assistant professor Mark Shriver. By examining well-maintained records kept in England during the Black Death (late 1340s and 1350s), the Penn State team has discovered that the Black Death spreads more rapidly than the bubonic plague, and the fatality rate of Black Death may be greater than previously believed. In addition, though historians have gathered reports of rats dying off in huge amounts among countries where the bubonic plague occurred, no such records exist during the Black Death in the fourteenth century.
    The Penn State researchers are probably the first to compile this amount of data on the epidemic. As Wood explains, “We’re in the early stages of a major re-evaluation of the fourteenth-century Black Death. We’re doing geographical mapping to chart the disease and form a clearer picture of its development. We don’t know what caused Black Death. We’re adopting the mindset of field epidemiologists confronted with a new disease to ask, ‘What can we really say about it?’”
    If differences are found, such knowledge could create a broader picture of disease patterns and how they develop, and eventually, the research “could contribute to our understanding of how dangerous new diseases evolve and spread, with important implications for the emergence of modern diseases such as AIDS and the Ebola virus.”