Author: Jim McFarlin

Race at the Center

Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Ferguson. Baltimore. Alton Sterling. Chicago. Black Lives Matter. Freddie Gray. Charlotte. Dallas. Philando Castile. Baton Rouge. Terence Crutcher. Tamir Rice. The steady, mournful drumbeat of racial unrest, senseless death and reactionary violence reverberates across our nation. Through social media, the Internet and other vehicles, details of each tragedy send shock waves… Continue Reading →

On the Eve of Shakespeare

How might the playwrights of the Reformation and pre-Reformation eras — even the great Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare — have reacted to seeing their works dissected and reviewed online? Dr. John Cox doesn’t know, of course — but he could make an educated guess. An internationally respected Shakespeare scholar and former president of… Continue Reading →

21st-Century Graffiti, with a 19th-Century Twist

Dr. Heidi Kraus remembers precisely the moment it happened. “When I was a young kid, I traveled to France,” recalls Kraus. “I remember walking into the Grand Gallery in the Louvre, where all the large-format paintings are. There was one painting in particular, ‘The Coronation of Napoleon’ by Jacques-Louis David. It’s basically life-sized and it… Continue Reading →

Performing Debussy as a Scholarly Pursuit

Dr. Andrew “Drew” Le completed his second CD in October 2017, performing all 12 piano études by French composer Claude Debussy, and it was an all-Hope production. The album was recorded — in one day — in the college’s gleaming new Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts, performed on the 9-foot Steinway Model D… Continue Reading →

Engineering Informed by Biology

Destructive earthquakes in Mexico, Chile and Russia in 2017 underscored the importance — and urgency — of the kind of innovative research Dr. Courtney Peckens is pursuing in VanderWerf Hall’s Haworth Engineering Center. Supported by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and a Nyenhuis Grant from Hope College, Peckens is developing and testing… Continue Reading →

Crafting a Theology of Disability

When his 7-year-old son Benedict was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3, it set Dr. Jared Ortiz on a personal, impassioned research track. Georges Rouault, French, 1871–1958, Ecce DolorPlate eight from the Passion, 1936 “I did a lot of reading, and there are wonderful resources in the Holland area, so we’ve been very… Continue Reading →

Culturally Dislocated?

Is Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali, the winsome astrophysicist played by Kunal Nayyar on the long-running CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, responsible for the alienation many Indian-Americans experience from mainstream U.S. media? That may be overstating matters a bit — but according to recent research by Dr. Marissa Doshi and a colleague, “Raj” is one of… Continue Reading →

A Poet’s Sojourn in Camden, New Jersey

Most people think of Walt Whitman, if they think of him at all, as that 19th-century poet from high school English Lit who penned Leaves of Grass. However, Dr. William Pannapacker thinks about Whitman a lot. And when he does, his thoughts fill with superlatives. “Walt Whitman is, in many ways, the preeminent literary figure… Continue Reading →

Confronting a Threat in West Michigan Forests

It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And Dr. K. Greg Murray admits he shed a tear upon discovering that the dreaded hemlock woolly adelgid had been spotted on hemlocks in Michigan. The invasive, destructive insect (pronounced a-DELL-jid), which sucks the sap from North American hemlock trees and dooms many of them, has taken… Continue Reading →

Abstract Visions of the Human Body

You are, by choice and training, an abstract artist. Because, in your words, “There is an inherent and permanent interest in creating bodies,” your work frequently features the human form. Professor Katherine Sullivan, do you ever feel you need to explain your “body art” to viewers? “Yes, yes I do,” admits Sullivan with a laugh.… Continue Reading →

A Philosopher Considers Modern Media, and Is Not Amused

Your “inscape” is in need of a total overhaul. You could start by throwing out your TV. That’s the rather iconoclastic view of Dr. Joseph LaPorte, whose particular focus is philosophy of biology and language. He contends that our “inscapes” — a term he borrows loosely from Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins — are on… Continue Reading →

What’s Stressful in Your Work?

Of course college students feel stress. Grades. Tuition. Peer pressure. Choosing the right table at Phelps Dining Hall. But what about college faculty? How does the pressure they feel at work compare to their corporate counterparts? Those are some questions Dr. Marcus Fila is examining in the latest of his studies on workplace stress, and… Continue Reading →

Combing Statistics for Clues to Future Mass Shootings

Sandy Hook. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The Capital Gazette newspaper. The Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The First Baptist Church of Sutherland, Texas. The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The roll call and the death toll keep rising, steadily and seemingly unchecked, and random mass shootings are… Continue Reading →

The Secret is Persistence

Matthew Baker ’08 dreamed of becoming a professional writer since the fourth grade, when he entered a “When I Grow Up” speech competition. “My speech was all about how I wanted to be Brian Jacques, the British guy who wrote the Redwall books,” Baker recalls. He wrote throughout high school in Grand Rapids but readily… Continue Reading →

Streamlining Robotic Coding

In a Hope College engineering laboratory, a roomful of Roombas® — or more accurately, Kobuki mobile robots (shaped like the popular Roomba vacuums, but with no cleaning power) — are carrying on earthbound research that grew out of knowledge a professor acquired while working on other robots intended for space exploration. And if the work… Continue Reading →

A Gothic Church, a Holy Tear

Jesus wept. And for seven centuries, a Benedictine abbey church in France claimed to have preserved the tear he shed. Dr. Anne Heath doesn’t challenge the belief that the Abbey of La Trinité (the Holy Trinity) in Vendôme once maintained and venerated a tear that Jesus cried at the tomb of Lazarus, as described in… Continue Reading →

Sitcoms, Fake News and Collective Memory

Dr. Choonghee Han believes every nation has a time in its collective past that it would just as soon forget. In America, for example, it could be Vietnam. “There have been lots of discussions and publications about the Vietnam War, how it was interpreted or digested by the public through the media,” says Han. “It… Continue Reading →

Sisters for a Lifetime

This is the most remarkable story you will read in this issue of News from Hope College. Or most any other magazine, for that matter. It’s about two women, both Hope College alums, born in the same hospital — the now-assimilated Blodgett in Grand Rapids — two years apart. Improbably, both mothers named their infant… Continue Reading →