Westmont Magazine Faculty Footnotes

Stan Anderson (chemistry, retired) collaborates on materials research at UC Santa Barbara with funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. His research group contributed to a paper, “Structures of Metallosupramolecular Coordination Assemblies Can Be Obtained by Ion Mobility Spectrometry-Mass Spectrometry,” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The board of directors of the Hispanic Association for the Humanities appointed Dinora Cardoso (Spanish) to direct the organization’s sixth International Congress set for June 2012 in Madrid, Spain.

Paul Delaney (English) wrote the program note, “Portrait of a Playwright,” for a revival of Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing” at the Old Vic Theatre in London.

Robert Gundry (scholar in residence) delivered a paper, “New Studies in the Synoptic Problem,” in November at the annual national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco. His book “Commentary on the New Testament” is now available in segments as an e-book; in several months the entire volume will be available as a single e-book.

Michelle Hughes (education) presented “Connecting the Heart and Social Justice Issues in the Classroom” at the Association of Christian Schools International Conference in November. She delivered a Westmont Downtown lecture, “Hot Topics and Highlights in Public Education,” in November in Santa Barbara. The Westmont Education Department hosted Let’s Talk Teaching, a conference she organized for local high school students interested in the teaching profession.

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science hosted more than 80 high school students in November at the college’s first Imagine Math Day, which David and Patti Hunter organized. Russ Howell spoke, and students explored new mathematics in a collaborative, creative setting, working in groups.

Heather Keaney (history) and Jim Wright (Westmont in Istanbul) presented a Westmont Downtown lecture in October, “The Arab Spring: Where Are the Swallows?” The couple lived in Egypt during the past decade and witnessed the Egyptian Revolution.

Tremper Longman III (Robert Gundry professor of biblical studies) contributed “Psalm 77: A Cry of the Soul” to a festschrift in honor of In Whan Kim, professor of Old Testament and former president of Chongshin University. He presented a position paper, “Creation of the Cosmos and Humanity in the Bible,” as a panelist at the Symposium on Genesis and Origins in Chattanooga, Tenn., in September. At the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San Francisco in November he presented “From Weeping to Rejoicing: Psalm 150 as the Conclusion to the Book of Psalms” and “Thinking Rightly about God: A Review of Disturbing Divine Behavior by E. A. Siebert.” He also served as a panelist there on Methodological Issues in the Interpretation of Old Testament Wisdom Literature and as a panelist for a review of C. Leong Seow, Job 1-21, at the concurrent Society of Biblical Literature meeting. He responded to papers on the Song of Songs in the SBL Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section.

Chandra Mallampalli (history) has written a new book, “Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family” published by Cambridge University Press in their series Studies in Indian History and Society.

Mark Nelson (philosophy) guest-edited the November 2011 issue of the international journal Philosophical Papers devoted to the persistent and perplexing epistemological problem of the criterion. The issue features nine articles by contributors from Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and the United States.

David Newton (economics and business) spoke on “Sustainable Job Creation” at the annual meeting of the Republican Women’s Organization of Ventura and Oxnard. The third printing of his book “Job Creation” includes a foreword by Arthur Laffer, President Reagan’s chief economic adviser. Newton wrote articles for Entrepreneur magazine, Pacific Coast Business Times and the Santa Barbara News-Press about the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Edd Noell (economics and business) presented a paper, “On the Impossibility of a Value-Free Economics: A Comparison of Austrian and Theonomic Evaluations of Market Decision-Making,” at the History of Economics Society meetings at the University of Notre Dame.

Gregory Orfalea (English) will consult with Detroit Public Television on a 13-part PBS series on Arab Americans. While doing research for a biography of Junipero Serra, he discovered 16 letters and other 18th century documents related to Serra and other confreres stored for a century in an old campesino’s farmhouse in the Sierra Gorda of Mexico.

Raymond Paloutzian (psychology, retired) has co-authored the following publications: “Religions, Meaning Making, and Basic Needs” for the journal Religion, Brain, and Behavior; “Spiritual Well-being Scale: Mental and Physical Health Relationships,” for “Spirituality in Healthcare” (Oxford University Press); “Spiritual Transformation and Engagement in Workplace Culture” for “Psychology of Religion and Workplace Spirituality” (Information Age Publishing); and “Interpersonal Forgiveness” for “Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology” (Wiley-Blackwell).

Helen Rhee (religious studies) published “Wealth, Poverty, and Eschatology: Pre-Constantine Jewish and Christian Social Thoughts and the Hope for the World to Come,” in “Patristic Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges.” She presented: “A Patristic View of Wealth and Possessions” at North Park Theological Seminary Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Money and Possessions; “Wealth, Business Activities and Blurring of Christian Identity” at the 16th International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford, England; and “Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Almsgiving and Salvation in Early Christianity” for the Paul C. Wilt Phi Kappa Phi Lecture at Westmont.

Warren Rogers (physics) organized the 14th annual Conference Experience for Undergraduates, where 135 students presented their research in nuclear physics. The event was held concurrently with the fall meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, where Rogers chaired a session, “Trends in Nuclear Physics.” He received a new three-year RUI grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his nuclear physics research program at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University. He and three Westmont students conducted a two-week experiment in June with physicists from seven collaborating institutions on the NSCL accelerator to commission the new LISA neutron detector array, constructed in part by Westmont students. He co-published two papers in Physical Review C, “Observation of a two-neutron cascade from a resonance in Oxygen-24” and “Neutron knockout of Beryllium-12 populating neutron-unbound states in Beryllium-11.” He chaired a session in gravitational physics at the conference of the California Section of the American Physical Society.

James Taylor edited the current issue, “Philosophical Perspectives on the Self and the Search for Meaning,” of the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s online journal In Pursuit of Truth: A Journal of Christian Scholarship. He wrote the introduction and one of the four essays, “Physicalism, Dualism, Death, and Resurrection.” The papers were delivered at the Philosophy Symposium of the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s Oxbridge 2008 conference, which Taylor directed.

David Vander Laan (philosophy) published “David Lewis’s Argument for Possible Worlds” in “Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy.”

Ruminate magazine, founded and edited by Brianna McCabe VanDyke ’02, has created an annual writing competition with a $1,000 award, the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize honoringRandall VanderMey (English). Funding comes from royalties on VanderMey’s composition textbook, “The College Writer: A Guide to Thinking, Writing, and Researching.”

Paul Willis (English), Santa Barbara’s poet laureate, co-hosted “Remembering the Tea Fire: A Community Reading” at Westmont in November. More than 17 local poets read works marking the anniversary of the devastating 2008 wildfire.

Edwin Zehner (anthropology) presented “Absorption Theories, Spirit Mediums, and Pentecostal Prophecies: Cases and Questions from Thailand” in a session on The Neuroanthropology of Dissociation, Absorption, and Embodiment: Research in Ritual, Play, and Entertainment” at the American Anthropological Association.