Instagram – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu The official news site for Fordham University. Fri, 19 Apr 2024 19:26:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://now.fordham.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/favicon.png Instagram – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu 32 32 232360065 The Class of 2018 on Instagram https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/the-class-of-2018-on-instagram/ Wed, 23 May 2018 20:44:11 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=90002 We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it’s accompanied by a Fordham hashtag, something special happens. We asked our graduating students to share their favorite memories, and they came through in spades. Congratulations, Class of 2018!

Daydreaming about being back at Fordham in a week ❄

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Saturdays at Fordham are my favorite (feat. Fr. McShane) 🐑❤🏈

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]]> 90002 Our Favorite Instagrams of 2017 https://now.fordham.edu/university-news/favorite-instagrams-2017/ Thu, 21 Dec 2017 18:18:00 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=82041

]]> 82041 Instagram 2016: Fordham Staff’s Top Pics for the Year https://now.fordham.edu/campus-life/instagram-2016-fordham-staffs-top-pics-for-the-year/ Thu, 22 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=60170 Instagram has been one of our favorite outlets for showcasing the University community, and it’s also clearly one of yours as well, as a little over 15,300 people currently follow us at https://www.instagram.com/fordhamuniversity/. As with last year, we went back through the year’s posting and picked out our favorites.

Joanna Mercuri


Oedipus Tyrannosaurus Rex: Sheer. Brilliance.

Tanisia Morris

A snowy, wintry day in #NYC ❄ Photo by @fordhamramblers • #Fordham #cunniffefountain #rosehill #bronx #snow

A photo posted by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity) on


This photograph of the Rose Hill campus after a snowfall is ethereal.

I like the backdrop of this image of Lincoln Center from the Lowenstein building. It really captures the stillness of the city.

Rachel Roman


Nothing beats fall foliage at Fordham (like the alliteration?), and I love when we showcase the Calder Center.

#merrychristmas #bronx #rosehill #fordham #verymerry

A photo posted by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity) on


This photo is beautiful. I’m making a Christmas card out of it.

Janet Sassi

There are no truer words of wisdom than the advice for new freshmen from this real New Yorker: Shop at the Dollar Store, where you can wander aimlessly for hours buying things you may or may not need, and still come out ahead.

With four years behind them, we asked 2016 graduates to recall the song that summed up the overall sentiment of their college experience.

Tom Stoelker

TOUCHDOWN! Fourth quarter, 47-14, Rams winning 🙌🏈 #RCCup #GoRams #fordhamfootball

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One of many touchdowns scored this season by the Rams, but this one is at Yankee Stadium for the Ram Crusader cup—which we won.

A late fall sunset over Fordham’s Westchester campus highlights the modernist gem by architect Victor Bisharat.

Patrick Verel

Keating Hall and the moon. It’s a winning combination. #rosehill #fordham2016 #awesome

A photo posted by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity) on


May 20, 2016: Twas the night before commencement, and under a vibrant full moon, you could practically feel the energy of graduations past amidst empty seats on Edwards Parade.

The Ram is the official mascot of the University, but for my money, the black squirrel rules the roost at Rose Hill.

 

Gina Vergel

Fordham offers so much to its students, but I love seeing when young people from NYC and beyond can enjoy our beautiful campuses!

Father McShane reading to little children? Instant favorite.

]]> 60170 Professor’s Research Helps LGBTQ Youth “Act Out” https://now.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/professors-research-helps-lgbtq-youth-act-out/ Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57712 At heart, Laura Wernick, Ph.D., assistant professor of social work, is an activist, scholar, and community organizer. She has worked with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. She has studied the domestic workers movement.

And she has studied and written about an organizational model that helps wealthy, young activists get involved in causes they care about without wielding their considerable power. (The resulting research was published in Social Work Research this year.)

“I look at how people with power and privilege can get involved in social justice movement without replicating existing power structures, such as coming in and taking over, and thinking that they need to be the leader,” she said.

In Wernick’s work, everything from the initial questions to the presentation of the study’s findings to the use of the data to effect change is done in very close consultation with those being studied. The process is called community-based participatory action research.

“It places the power of research and knowledge in the hands of communities most impacted,” she said. “It’s a way to use research to bring people together to assess what they’ve collected and then use that knowledge as an organizing tool.”

Wernick’s research began to gel when she moved from New York City to Ann Arbor in 1998 to work on her doctoral degree at the University of Michigan. Once there, people who knew of her activist work contacted her to help a group of LGBTQ teens who were experiencing bullying in school. The teens had been part of a study before, but Wernick said that they had found the questions from the previous study irrelevant to their day-to-day lives.

This time, with Wernick, they would develop the questions.

The students were interested in creating a survey that addressed bullying, issues of heterosexual and cisgender normativity, and how the school’s emotional climate might affect homophobia and transphobia. They also wanted the survey to be about race and physical appearance.

Wernick obliged by working with the youth to create a questionnaire and organizing model that would ultimately cross multiple identities—race, class, gender, and religion to name a few.

To date, Wernick and the youth have co-authored and published eight papers on their project. The initial survey produced an article that was published in the Children and Youth Services Review in 2012.

Besides their activist interests, the teens became interested in the research process as well. “They wanted to understand what statistical significance meant, what bell curves were,” she said. “They learned how to use Stata, a statistical software, how to do T tests, and they understood what a regression model is. This is stuff that these kids became interested in!”

One student-participant became her research assistant; he is now earning his doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Another is working his law degree at Harvard.

But while there were clear educational benefits to the student-participants, it wasn’t the primary purpose of the study, she said.

After the first survey was completed, the students opted for an unconventional approach to distributing its findings. They used theater to spread the results. Wernick compared their effort to the Theater of the Oppressed—using theater as storytelling in order to promote social and political change.

Students wanted to present the play to their peers at the high school and middle school levels. But given the sensitive subject matter, Wernick said that they had to present it first to the school board, then the school district principals, and then teachers and social workers before finally getting to present it to their classmates. The process offered yet another opportunity to collect data, as each audience completed a survey about their attitudes towards the subject matter before and after the performance.

In one scene a student would act out walking down a hallway and hearing someone say, “That’s so gay.” The actor would then portray his inner feelings while another actor would deliver the cold hard data: 76 percent of gay students experience bullying and harassment.

Wernick said the process provided several points of data collection, furthering opportunities for the youth to reflect upon their actions and use the data in their ongoing work. The initial “climate survey” assessed the bullying, harassment, and microaggressions that LGBTQ youth were experiencing. A qualitative survey before and after the show assessed the impact that the study and the show had on the adult and student audiences, as well as the youth participants. Finally, another study LINK looked at the how the community action affected the students own sense of well- being (That paper, was published in Journal of Community Psychology, 2014).

Needless to say, attitudes shifted from before and after the performance. The results found their way into “Theater and Dialogue to Increase Youth’s Intentions to Advocate for LGBTQQ People,” published this year in Research on Social Work Practice.

“It was institutional change, organizational change, and personal change,” said Wernick, barely containing her excitement. “It was all these things!”

]]> 57712 Where the Winged Things Are: Study Reveals NYC Bat Populations https://now.fordham.edu/science/where-the-winged-things-are-study-reveals-nyc-bat-populations/ Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:30:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=58072 It turns out Gotham really does have bats plying its skies, plucking unsuspecting prey, and dispatching them into the great unknown.

Fordham University and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo has conducted the first known study of bats in an urban area on the East Coast. The study provides evidence of both breeding and migration patterns of several species through the area.

“Bats in the Bronx: Acoustic Monitoring of Bats in New York City,”  published in the journal Urban Naturalist, provides evidence of bat activity in the city and documents the migratory movement of Eastern Red Bats and Silver-Haired Bats through the Bronx in particular.

A hoary bat, one of three bats found to be active in NYC during the winter. Photo by Daniel Neal
A hoary bat, one of three bats found to be active in NYC during the winter.
Photo by Daniel Neal

J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences and one of the authors of the study, said the biggest surprise was the presence of three bats— Lasiurus borealis (Eastern Red Bat), L. cinereus (Hoary Bat), and Lasionycteris noctivagans (Silver-Haired Bat), during the winter months—a time when it was assumed they’d have migrated away from the area or begun hibernating.

“I was told by some bat experts there would be no winter bat activity, and that I’d be foolish for looking,” he said. “We had no idea how much we’d learn about bats here in the Bronx, so the results are both surprising and exciting.”

To identify bat species and activity levels, the Fordham/WCS team acoustically monitored bats at the Bronx Zoo, Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the New York Botanical Garden and in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx.

A screenshot from SonoBat. Insectivorous bats have call frequencies that typically range between 20 kHz and 60 kHz which is outside of the frequency of human hearing (20 - 20,000 Hz). To make the calls audible to people they are converted to a lower frequency.
A screenshot from SonoBat. Insectivorous bats have call frequencies that typically range between 20 kHz and 60 kHz which is outside of the frequency of human hearing (20 – 20,000 Hz). To make the calls audible to people they are converted to a lower frequency.

Bat activity was recorded using both acoustic-recording devices on building rooftops and with handheld ultrasonic recording units. Using a software program called Sonobat, the team was able to identify different species by the echolocation calls that the bats produce in flight in order to navigate and locate their prey.

The initial study began in May 2012 and identified the presence of five out of a possible nine species found in New York State: Eptesicus fuscus (Big Brown Bat), Lasiurus borealis (Eastern Red Bat), L. cinereus (Hoary Bat), Lasionycteris noctivagans (Silver-Haired Bat), and Perimyotis subflavus (Tri-Colored Bat).

Of the five species detected, the most-represented was Eastern Red Bats. A July increase of its activity, followed by an August peak and sharp decline in September, suggests migratory movement through New York City, as the pattern is consistent with acoustic surveys collected in the Midwest and East Coast. In addition, an increase in Silver-Haired Bat activity occurred in late October—consistent with the timing of coastal migratory movements for this species.

The initial study, published in June 2016 and still ongoing at the Bronx Zoo, hopes to monitor year-round bat activity in the park and to identify any changes in patterns of call activity that could occur as a result of environmental factors.

Additionally, the study has been expanded to include acoustic bat surveying at the three other WCS parks—Central Park Zoo, Queens Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo—using the same monitoring methods. Initial results from the ongoing surveys reveal that the same five species occur in these three boroughs as well, although the call compositions are represented by different species at each park.

Clark has previously documented the positive effects of green roofs on birds in New York; and it’s clear that what is true for fowl is true for bats as well.

Study co-authors also included Fordham’s Kaitlyn L. Parkins, GSAS ‘15 and Michelle Mathios, FCRH, ‘13,and Colleen McCann, Ph.D., curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo.

]]> 58072 Matt Trebek: Bringing Mexican Street Food to Harlem https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/matt-trebek-bringing-mexican-street-food-to-harlem/ Thu, 27 Oct 2016 05:16:12 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=58064 Above: Matt Trebek, FCRH ’13, co-owner of Oso. Photos by B.A. Van Sise, FCLC ’05Wearing a T-shirt and ballcap, Matt Trebek sits at a table at Oso, the Hamilton Heights Mexican restaurant he co-owns, explaining how he got involved in the hospitality industry. As he speaks, bartenders serve up drinks from a tequila-and-mescal-heavy cocktail menu he helped develop. To his left, a colorful graffiti mural like the ones he’d seen in Mexico City adorns one of the walls. Old-school hip-hop, funk, jazz, and soul help create a relaxed vibe—another decision he had a hand in. And across from him, diners sit in wooden banquettes that he built himself.

Indeed, for Trebek, owning a restaurant is about much more than food.

“There was just something about the hospitality industry that I fell in love with,” he says. “It’s great because it’s very free form in that it allows you to venture out into so many different fields: design, food, drinks, music, graphic design, and even just talking to people.”

magazine_trebek_bar_detail3Trebek had bartended at various Manhattan spots before graduating from Fordham in 2013, but it was a stint serving drinks at the since-shuttered restaurant Willow Road in Chelsea that set into motion his career as a restaurateur. While there, Trebek became enamored not just with mixology but with the architectural design of restaurants. He connected with the designer who had worked on Willow Road’s interior, and began working as a carpenter for his company. Eventually, Trebek and his business partner—the guy who’d shown him the ropes at the first of his bartending gigs in the city—had an idea for a restaurant of their own. And this past May, after three years of planning, the pair opened Oso, a 44-seat restaurant specializing in Mexican street food and craft cocktails.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Trebek—the son of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek—would go to the local farmer’s market every Sunday to get carne asada tacos and quesadillas. He developed a love for the cuisine, and in talking with the vendors, learned about their recipes and style of cooking. But after moving to New York, he found the options for Mexican food lacking. “You’ll have a chef who will put his own spin on it, which is great, but it kind of loses its authenticity of being Mexican street food,” he says of the cuisine characterized by dishes that are quick to make and eat, and relatively inexpensive.

Trebek made two scouting trips to Mexico City, and Oso’s menu is inspired by the food he encountered. “The idea behind Oso was to take the street fare we loved [in Mexico City] and turn the dining experience into something communal rather than personalized,” he says. Everything in the restaurant is made from scratch, and he says the restaurant works with a family from Puebla to make sure things remain as authentic as possible. (The restaurant even makes two types of mole using recipes handed down by that family.)

magazine_trebek_tacos

Trebek says he doesn’t get his palette from his famous dad. “He would be fine eating chicken, white rice, and broccoli for the rest of his life,” he says. But his father—“a handyman at heart,” according to Matt—helped out in other ways, like following the construction progress and inspecting the space when visiting New York.

The opportunity to open a restaurant in Harlem that could become part of the fabric of the community was a big draw for Trebek. “Early on when we were scoping out spaces, we heard of a bar called Harlem Public,” he says. “We went there and saw such a strong community behind this place. It was seeing that type of vibe and support that really drew us to opening in Hamilton Heights.” There’s a strong sense of community within Oso’s leadership group, as well—both the restaurant’s chef and the project manager who oversaw the build-out live in the Harlem apartment building that Trebek owns and also lives in.

magazine_trebek_2Because Trebek hired the same designer who’d worked on Willow Road, Oso includes some of Trebek’s favorite features from that space, from the open kitchen to the raw aesthetic that here takes the form of unfinished floors, faux-concrete walls, and reclaimed wood. And Trebek’s Mexico City visits helped inform the décor, too, from the graffiti mural to the the faux cow skull hanging opposite the bar to the greenery that helps hide some of the air conditioning ducts.

Trebek says he’d love to open another restaurant someday, and has even thought about what such a place might look like (more of an emphasis on the bar, he says). But for the moment, he’s focused on Oso. “Right now it’s kind of all hands on deck here, just trying to make this as perfect as it can be,” he says.

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06, is an associate editor at New York magazine’s website and a frequent contributor this magazine.

[doptg id=”63″] ]]> 58064 Fordham Foodies Bring the Heat in the Kitchen https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/fordham-foodies-bring-the-heat-in-the-kitchen/ Wed, 26 Oct 2016 22:27:37 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=58118 Above: Gabelli School seniors Bentley Brown (left) and Jake Madsen. Photos by Bruce GilbertLots of college students cook casually in their dorms or apartments. A stir-fry here, a pasta dish there. But few rise to the level of Jake Madsen and Bentley Brown. When these Gabelli School of Business seniors set out to cook you a meal, they pull out all the stops. On the menu on a recent fall evening: spicy carrot soup, steak au poivre, striped bass, and octopus.

The pair often throw spontaneous dinners for large groups. But on this rainy night they were expecting just a few friends. In their off-campus Bronx apartment, Otis Redding and Van Morrison tunes played, candles flickered, and their kitchen radiated warmth and a scent that was just barely sweet. Madsen was prepping the first course.

“I’m just making something to get you guys started,” he says to a guest, straightening up from the oven, where he’d been inspecting his loaf of sourdough. “I got into breadmaking last year. It’s really fun, because sourdough has a science. You have to create lacto-fermentation, you have to harvest your own yeast,” says the son of a chemistry teacher.

jakebread400After quickly spraying some water into the oven to maintain humidity, he notes, “I’m working on perfecting crust. I remember being a little kid saying I don’t like the crust—now I’m so excited about crust!”

Madsen and Brown lived across the hall from each other freshman year and became fast friends, bonding over, among other things, their love of cooking. They moved in together last year, along with two other Gabelli students. They were excited to find an apartment with a nice kitchen and separate dining space, as well as a sprawling outdoor patio.

“We called this apartment ‘the Dream,’” Madsen says. “Other places were a little closer to campus, but we said, ‘this place has granite countertops!’” They’ve hosted large barbecues with homemade-barbecue-sauce ribs and live bands on their patio, as well as more low-key indoor gatherings. Last year, they had about 40 people over for a “Friendsgiving” feast—which included a 15-pound turkey and 15 pounds of ribs.

foodiesbg05choppingWhile he waits for Brown to come home with the evening’s main ingredients, Madsen gets to work on his spicy carrot soup, which he makes with carrots he picked from St. Rose’s Garden on the Rose Hill campus, where he volunteers. He’s also using some selects from his big batch of red and green peppers—spicy and sweet—which he grew himself. He dices and slices, tossing ingredients into the blender while keeping an eye on his bread. Soon he’ll plate them together—the sourdough ready to soak up the piping hot soup.

Brown arrives laden with packages from Arthur Avenue, where he and Madsen shop “almost exclusively.” He unwraps a thick, bright-red cut of beef from Vincent’s Meat Market (the “best butcher shop in the Bronx,” he says) a large silvery striped bass, and a slippery whole octopus, which he will confidently drop into a pot of boiling water.

bentleyoctopus400Brown says he developed his culinary skills when he was a child. “I’m a really picky eater, so I cooked for myself,” except for when his father made southern food. “I made my own eggs—put stuff in them that I liked.”

Despite being busy college students and gourmet chefs, both young men have significant work responsibilities. Brown’s late father was an artist—a painter known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians—so Brown works with museums and galleries that show his father’s work. He’s also on the executive board of ASILI—the Black student alliance at Fordham—and is a research assistant with Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project. Madsen works as a bookkeeper in his father’s real estate development firm, which brought him to Australia for the summer to work with a client. Both students are studying entrepreneurship at Gabelli.

With so much going on, one wouldn’t think there’d be time for such epicurean endeavors. But the roommates say that cooking helps them “de-stress.” Also? “We just really love doing it,” says Brown, who, truth be told, is not a total amateur. He worked for a time for a chef in Arizona who’s now working in France. His favorite thing to cook? Coq au vin.

octopus400With his creamy peppercorn sauce simmering, the octopus boiling, and the steak in the oven, Brown sits at the dining table with his laptop open. “Sorry, I’m finishing a paper,” he says. It’s midterm time so he must multitask, but he’s not worried that anything will burn or boil over. “At this point, I’ve been cooking so long I have an internal timer.”

Meanwhile, Madsen’s got his mind on his peppers and how they might complement the octopus.

“Can I make the sauce, Bentley? Please, please?”

Brown gives him the OK. “Jake loves sauces,” he tells a guest.

Madsen heads to the stove. “This sauce is new—today,” he declares. He concocts a thick, sweet and spicy sauce using passion fruit juice, pineapple chunks, vinegar, ketchup, and several treasures from St. Rose’s Garden, including tomatillos and cayenne, scorpion, and Tabasco peppers.

carrots400Madsen uses his peppers to make batches of hot sauce, which he always keeps on hand. After a friend gave him a Carolina Reaper plant—which yields the hottest pepper in the world—he decided to challenge himself. “I said, ‘I’m gonna make a hot sauce that uses Carolina Reaper that isn’t masochistic.” His finished product uses mango, pineapple, ginger, and lime, and as promised, does not set the mouth on fire. (Though it’s still got plenty of kick.)

Soon friends are trickling into the apartment, and everyone’s sitting down to eat. Eleni Koukoulas, a Gabelli School senior, said she’s been over once or twice before to eat with the Fordham foodies.

“It’s not very conventional college,” she says. “You could just tell it’s something they really love, and that they love to share it with other people.”

As everyone digs in, Brown hears one of his other roommates come in the front door. “Hey, Phil,” he shouts. “Come get you some food!”

 

]]> 58118 10 Tips for Making the Most of Your First Year at Fordham https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/10-tips-for-making-the-most-of-your-first-year-at-fordham/ Tue, 25 Oct 2016 16:35:23 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57908 Senior English major Emily Mendez gives new students tips, advice, and personal insight into their first year at Fordham.

1. Your Newfound Freedom

The moment you get to college is the moment you really gain your independence. Of course your family will always be there for you, and your professors will have your best interests in mind. But you now have more autonomy than ever. It might take a while, but learn to use that freedom wisely.

2. Choosing a Major

If you don’t love it, don’t major in it. If you love the idea of examining themes in French literature, analyze that. And if you’re interested in how to manage liquid financial assets, study that. Or, better yet, do both. Fordham gives you the time to figure out what you want to do, and the opportunity to be successful doing it.

3. A Dip in the Deep End

My favorite class? English Theory. It’s a requirement for the English major, but I personally think it should be a requirement for everyone. It takes everything you think you know about English as a language and breaks it down scientifically, politically, and culturally. That’s what a good college class does: It takes something you already know and love, and then shows you that you’ve really been swimming in shallow water all along. There’s a whole ocean just waiting for you.

4. Clubs and Extracurriculars

When you’re deciding on what clubs and activities to pursue outside of school, don’t pick them—let them pick you. You’re not doing things for a college acceptance letter or a well-rounded resume anymore. These activities are a reflection of who you are, and if you want to teach traditional Latin American ballroom dance to middle school students, don’t be afraid to take that initiative and do it.

5. Striking a Balance

While there are thousands of potential internships in New York City and in Fordham’s network, not every learning opportunity comes with a title. Even if your job is nine to five on Mondays and Thursdays, learning happens all seven days of the week. Take that assistantship at the law firm. Be that partner at the fashion house. But don’t forget to just relax sometimes and people watch at the park. If Fordham is your school, let New York be your professor every now and then.

6. Find Your Passion and a Career Will Follow

I came to college thinking I would be a pre-med biology major. Now with a rediscovered love of English (my new major), I’m looking into teaching, education reform, law, public policy, or a combination of all four. As long as you have a passion for it, you’ll find something that allows you to channel that passion into positive change.

7. New York Is Your Campus

There are about 13 miles between the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses, and about 196 countries in the world. If you travel those few short miles, you’ll see that they somehow manage to accommodate nearly all of the world’s cultures. But don’t forget to branch out even farther—start following the music scene in Brooklyn, spend some time discovering the diversity of food flavors in Queens, or check out what the Coney Island Mermaid Parade is all about. Fordham is your school, New York is your campus, and this is your world. Don’t forget to explore it.

8. Expanding Your Palate

If you enter college a picky eater, trust me, you’re not leaving as one. Whether it’s mofongo y lechón, bánh mì, soupe à l’oignon, or bibimbap, there are honestly infinite options—although I can’t guarantee you’ll leave knowing how to properly pronounce all of them.

9. Learning as a Community

In art, diptychs are two pieces, literally hinged together like a book, that are meant to be admired in tandem. In literature, diptychs are poems meant to be read together, each lending to the meaning and significance of the other. In the college classroom, diptychs are everywhere: You’ll form them with professors and fellow students. Watching your personal understanding of the world grow is great, but watching everyone hinge on each other and work together as a community of learners is amazing.

10. The Value of Growth

There’s no way to put this lightly: You’re going to change. A lot. But you should. Change is just growth, and if my high-school self could have looked into the future and seen her college self, she would have been pretty shocked, but even more proud. And after going to a school like Fordham, I trust that you’ll be proud of yourself too.

—Emily Mendez

]]> 57908 Professor Sees Racism as a ‘Profound Warping of the Human Spirit’ https://now.fordham.edu/living-the-mission/professor-sees-racism-as-a-profound-warping-of-the-human-spirit/ Fri, 21 Oct 2016 13:58:44 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57461 Is it possible to be true to the Catholic faith while dismissing the existence of systemic racism? For a large number of Catholics, the answer is, unfortunately, yes.

Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., wants to change that. Because when it comes to problems like police shootings of black men, solutions such as body cameras, retraining, and civilian review boards are not enough on their own.

“They’re going to be limited and ineffective if we don’t go deeper, and we don’t probe the woundedness in the human spirit that enables people to be less valued than others simply because of the color of their skin,” he said.

“Until we’re willing to look at root causes, we’re going to be stuck in this destructive feedback loop.”

Father Massingale, a native of Milwaukee who joined the theology faculty in September, has devoted his life to the intersection of faith and race. For too long, he said, Catholics have turned a blind eye to racism even though the teachings of Jesus explicitly call for respecting the dignity of all races and genders.

He experienced it himself as a child, he says.  At his Catholic grammar school, the priests were devoted to racial justice. But his Catholic high school fostered a culture that was less supportive of the cause.

“As I went further in my studies, I realized that this was not necessarily an exception. The Catholic Church in general is marked by silence and complicity in the racial injustices of America,” he said.

This argument was the central theme of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis Books, 2010), which won Father Massingale a first-place book award from the Catholic Press Association.

Key to his argument is Jesus’ teachings: When we die, we will be judged not for our attendance at Mass, but by our concern for the most vulnerable.

“Who are among the most expendable in this time and this place? Young African- American men who are being regarded with suspicion and treated with a social callousness that we haven’t seen in this country for a long time,” he said.

The challenge lies in the fact that research that shows that the more religious a person is, the more likely they’ll embrace racially discriminatory attitudes. A study released this year by the Pew Research Center that found that 80 percent of black Christians say the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner are evidence of systemic racism in this country, while over 70 percent of white Christians disagree, saying they are simply isolated incidents. Father Massingale called it an uncomfortable paradox, given that Christianity was a guiding force for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.

One way to advance the conversation is to educate others on racial history: Black Americans start out with fewer resources than whites, a residual effect of racist Jim Crow laws that only disappeared in the 1960s.

“Conversations about race are very uncomfortable because they force us to understand that the privileges that have accrued to white Americans haven’t accrued simply because of hard work, but because of a playing field that has been deliberately constructed to not be level,” said Father Massingale.

When teaching, he uses the game Monopoly to introduce the concept of privilege to his students. Two players get packets representing poor blacks and Latinos: $250 and a house on Baltic, Mediterranean, or Oriental Avenues. Four players get packets representing white, middle class Americans: $2,500 and a house on one of the orange or red properties. One player gets a packet representing a wealthy, white American: $6,500, a hotel on Boardwalk, a house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Reading Railroad, a utility company, and a “Get out of jail free” card.

Since everyone is “equal,” they all get $200 whenever they pass GO.

“Very soon students will start saying things like, ‘Why should I play a game that I can’t win?’ I’ll see students with $250 dollars going bankrupt, and I’ll say ‘What, you’re not working hard enough?’” he said.

“Even though we’re living in an era of formal equality where everyone is supposedly treated the same, you’ve got a legacy of unequal treatment that doesn’t just vanish,” he said.

Father Massingale is currently working on two new projects: editing a collection of writings by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who wrote powerful, prophetic essays about racism that have since gone out of print; and a book on the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm recognized the depths of racism in ways that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t until later in life, and his influence can be seen in the Black Lives Matter movement today.

He says he’s hopeful that, with faith, changes will come, even though ultimately it will take a long time and many people will be hurt in the meantime.

“Faith gives us a different horizon for how to look at these issues . . . not in terms of a zero sum game, or in terms of a current election. When we look at them in terms of faith, we say, ‘These are truly sisters and brothers who share a common humanity.’”

]]> 57461 Panel Debates Shifting Role of Faith in National Politics https://now.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/panel-debates-shifting-role-of-faith-in-national-politics/ Thu, 20 Oct 2016 17:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57617 In an election year when countless political norms have been shattered, the role of religion has likewise been thrown into disarray, a panel agreed on Oct. 18 at the Lincoln Center campus.

“Soul-Searching on the Eve of the Election: Religion and the Future of American Politics,” a panel discussion held by the Center on Religion and Culture, tackled everything from Catholics’ role in the 2016 election to the silence surrounding ISIS’ genocide of Christians and Yazidis.

A large part of the night was devoted to discussing white evangelical voters’ support for Donald Trump. David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, said that in 2016, race, gender, and partisan identity are more influential than religion. Levels of social capital and age are also a factor, as white evangelicals who are younger and have more social networks are resisting their leaders’ embrace of Trump.

Eddie Glaude Jr., the author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), said in the black community, religion still has a place in the political arena. Bree Newsome, the woman who climbed a flagpole in June 2015 to remove a Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, recited Psalms 27 as she was alighting from the pole.

Tom Reese, S.J., columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, pointed out parallels in the decline of both religious and political groups. In 2014, 39 percent of Americans identified politically as independents. Likewise, the number of people identifying as having no religious affiliation (“nones”) has increased to about 25 percent of the U.S. population.

Panelists criticized the Obama Administration’s inattention to religiously motivated killings. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom, said that in March, the administration correctly labeled the killing of Yazidis by ISIS as a genocide, yet has done little to publicize the issue since then.

Perhaps due to her Methodist background, Hillary Clinton seems uncomfortable talking about her religion, said Father Reese. Her campaign is trying to simultaneously appeal to Hispanic Catholics, black Protestants and most importantly, young people who identify as “nones.” Push religion too hard, he said, and they risk alienating nonreligious voters.

“The Democratic party is quite conflicted when it comes to how they want to talk about religion. They’ll talk about  [it]one way in the black community and with Hispanics, but with a different crowd, it’s just not an issue,” he said.

When it comes to Catholic voters, Father Reese said, although they traditionally lean Republican, it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll vote this year. The primary exit polls only asked if a voter was evangelical; not if they were Catholic.

What is clear, he said, is that many religious leaders have become like “generals without troops.” Black religious leaders championed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but then switched their support for Barack Obama when Obama started winning votes on the ground in primaries. In this election cycle, white evangelical leaders supported Ted Cruz, yet their followers backed Donald Trump.

Blankenhorn said the Church of Latter Day Saints is a rare exception. Its leaders and followers traditionally vote Republican, but are both shunning Trump in such numbers that Trump may lose the state of Utah. It’s not a coincidence that the church is growing, and members have high levels of social capital.

“One thing that’s interesting to me is this trend where a few groups take a different path,” he said.

Video of the discussion can be found here.

]]> 57617 New Research Reveals Migration Patterns of Brown Rats https://now.fordham.edu/science/new-research-reveals-migration-patterns-of-brown-rats/ Wed, 19 Oct 2016 05:36:11 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57465 Rattus norvegicus, best known to New Yorkers as the Norway, sewer or subway rat, are a common feature of cities around the world, but unlike black rats and house mice, they only migrated fairly recently from their native Northern China and Mongolia to the rest of the world.

In a study published on Oct. 19 in the Royal Society’s flagship journal Proceedings B, scientists from Fordham reveal the complex routes that Rattus norvegicus has taken over the last several centuries, and where different lineages have settled and occasionally mixed with each other.

Global population divergence and admixture of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) was authored by Emily Puckett, Ph.D., postdoctoral associate at Fordham’s Louis Calder Biological Field Station, along with 17 co-authors. The study is the first large-scale genomic analysis of brown rats around the world, using 314 specimens from 76 locations that were submitted over the last three years to the lab of co-author Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., associate professor of biology.

Understanding the evolution and ecology of Rattus norvegicus is important because they cause billions of dollars in damage annually around the world, and significantly degrade the quality of life and health of city dwellers.

The Fordham study determined that 13 evolutionary clusters have followed five routes out of China and Mongolia. The first expansion traveled southward into Southeast Asia, and then moved east, toward the Pacific coast of Asia.

Rattus norvegicus, where New Yorkers are accustomed to seeing them. Photo by Jason Munshi-South
Rattus norvegicus, where New Yorkers are accustomed to seeing them.
Photo by Jason Munshi-South

Over time, two groups headed west to North America—one via Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and another towards the Pacific Coast of North America. Meanwhile, another group ventured west, making it through Western Asia and the Middle East, and into Europe, where they split into two subgroups in Western Europe and Northern Europe.

Brown rats were then able to colonize eastern North America, South America, Africa, and New Zealand via ships originating from European colonial powers.

For Americans, Puckett said this study in phylogeography is useful because it illustrates how Rattus norvegicus arrived on the continent via different routes, and with different genetic makeups. Further study will examine how individual populations vary genetically, with the aim of determining the best way to control diseases that rats spread.

For instance, the study found that in New York City, the rats that arrived from Western Europe, most likely on British ships, have to this day remained the only brown rat lineage to establish itself. In contrast, some rat populations on the west coast exhibit evidence of colonization from both Europe or eastern North America, and Asia.

Even for rats, New York City is a tough place to make it as an outsider.

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