It was announced today that Irma and Norman Braman, of Miami, Fla., have given $1 million toward establishing an endowed chair at the center. The gift, along with funds raised from other interested donors, will allow UF to hire a distinguished senior professor of Holocaust studies.

“This significant show of private support for a faculty position is exactly what the university needs to continue to excel, particularly in these times of state budget cuts,” said UF President Bernie Machen. “We are grateful to the Bramans for their generosity and foresight.”

“The senior-level position will galvanize our curriculum,” said Jack Kugelmass, Sam Melton Professor and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UF.

“Recruiting a distinguished scholar in this field of study will amplify the quality of our course offerings in general and will encourage more graduate students to pursue masters and doctoral research in this particular area,” according to Kugelmass.

Today the field has become a core area of Jewish studies and helps to link Jewish studies with various European area studies programs, as well as to departments of comparative literature, film and philosophy. Indeed, the Holocaust as a subject of study has become integral to much of the humanities.

The Center for Jewish Studies at UF was established in 1973 by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It offers both a major and minor, as well as study abroad programs. Overall, UF has at least five faculty members in different disciplines teaching in the area of Holocaust studies.

“We feel a very strong commitment to supporting Holocaust studies on the university level,” said Norman Braman. “The murder of 6,000,000 Jews for no crime other than being Jewish must be studied so that the world will never have to endure such inhumanity again. Our high opinion of the Center for Jewish Studies led us to direct our resources to UF.”

“We are also appreciative of the level of education our grandson (Alex Shack) received at UF,” continued Braman. “He came to UF four years ago as a boy and is graduating as a man.”

In recognition of their gift the faculty position will be named the Norman and Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Funds received for the endowed position are eligible for matching funds from the state of Florida Trust Fund for Major Gifts, which would increase the value of the endowment for the chair significantly.

A national search for the position is expected to begin next fall.

The University of Florida is currently in a seven-year capital campaign themed Florida Tomorrow. As of March 31st, $646 million had been raised toward a goal of $1.5 billion. More information can be found at www.floridatomorrow.ufl.edu.

“Ethnic and national distinctions between Jews and Arabs blur in the soccer arena,” said Tamir Sorek, a UF professor in sociology and Jewish studies who is author of the new book “Arab Soccer in a Jewish State,” published by Cambridge University Press. “Arabs who are spectators in the stadium are much more integrated into Israeli society.”

Sorek found that Arab soccer fans are more likely than non-soccer fans to vote for Zionist political candidates, a vote that is incompatible with their own interests. For example, among those who attended at least one soccer game, 64 percent said they intended to vote for the Zionist candidate in the 1999 election for Israeli prime minister compared with 27 percent who did not go to soccer games at all, he said.

Sorek’s book is based on research he began in 1998 while a graduate student at Hebrew University. He surveyed 173 males between the ages of 16 and 40 and interviewed a separate set of 448 men aged 18 to 50 who make up a representative sample of Israel’s Arab population. Participants were asked about their sports preferences, degree of involvement in soccer and their voting intentions regarding political candidates.

His research involved Arab citizens of Israel, not Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“Despite these surprising findings, there is no evidence yet that integration in soccer contributes to the Arabs’ acceptance by the Jewish majority as citizens with equal rights,” Sorek said. “Arabs face discrimination in matters of government budgets, employment opportunities and prospects for development of their towns and villages. Deep involvement in the soccer arena, however, seems to dull their feelings of discrimination.”

Arab fans in the bleachers show solidarity with Jews by cursing and cheering their team in Hebrew, Sorek said. They also demonstrate their team spirit by wearing scarves printed in Hebrew and buying bumper stickers in the language, he said.

Sorek said he would have expected Arab-Palestinian displays of national identity in the stadium based on the experience of other minorities. At the very least, these groups bring their flags to soccer games and in extreme cases turn stadiums into sites of political protest, as with the Athletic Bilbao team representing Spain’s Basque minority and the Sporting Youth of Kabylia Club in Algeria serving as a rallying point for the Amazigh ethno-nationalist cultural movement, he said.

“Surprisingly, despite the significance Arab men in Israel give to sports and especially to soccer, the soccer field is far from being a site for political resistance or explicit national identification,” he said.

Even at games played while there were nationalist tensions, the fans refrained from waving their flags, Sorek said. “They know the Jewish Israeli interpret the Palestinian flag as a defiant act of political protest and as something directed against them,” he said.

His research also showed that Arab municipalities were much more likely than their Jewish counterparts to give money to soccer clubs. Sorek said he believes the main reason for Arab municipalities’ strong support is their aspiration for further integration in Israeli society.

“In the soccer sphere they have the opportunity to feel as equal citizens because they are not judged by their ethnicity, religion or national identity as Palestinians,” he said. “They even represent Israel in international competitions.”

Sorek, who grew up Jewish in Israel playing soccer with Arab teams, said the idea for the study came from observing the large number of soccer players who were Arab. Although Arabs represent only 16 percent of the country’s population, they make up 36 percent of the Israeli Football Association, he said.

“Although soccer provides excellent opportunities to reduce the social distance between Jews and Arabs in Israel, it is far from being a cure for their troubled relationship,” he said. “For that to happen, the Israeli state should first change its policy toward its Arab citizens.”

Paul Silverstein, a Reed College anthropology professor, called the book “essential reading for anyone interested in everyday life in the Middle East.”

How quaint.

Move over, pastor. Make room for “pastorpreneur.” The Old School church of days gone by has given way to marketing magic. In his latest book, “Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face,” University of Florida English professor James B. Twitchell explains not only how and why it happened but also what it means for America’s churchgoers.

In his book, scheduled for publication Sept. 18, Twitchell examines today’s megachurch movement as well as how today’s religious leaders have used media — from books and movies to radio and blogs — to build a competitive marketplace that rivals the cream of corporate America.

The book, Twitchell says, “has nothing to do with belief. It has to do with the people who deliver the service structure of religion. It’s not surprising that these churches seek ways to differentiate themselves, because what they’re selling are very similar products.”

Church, Twitchell writes, has become something people simply try on for size – and it fits only as long as the pastor keeps them happy.

The most visible manifestation of religious marketing phenomenon is the megachurch.

“Inside church proper there are all the technologies men appreciate: the sound system, the JumboTron screens and the comfy seats,” he writes. “Best yet, there are none of those grayhairs of Route 21 threatening to pray for this and that, including you.”

Leading people in worship, he says, has taken a back seat to giving people a reason to come and, in turn, grow church membership.

Today, he writes, “Successful churches have one thing in common: They are entertaining. Fun! … Not only is God alive, He rocks.”

While churches recruiting new members is hardly new, Twitchell writes, the concept of religious marketing is a relatively recent event that can be traced back to the mid-1950s. He recounts the story of Pennsylvania entrepreneur Mel Stewart, who built a business out of making and selling the now-familiar lighted signs with changeable plastic letters and pithy sayings so common in front of houses of worship.

From those humble roots, Twitchell writes, come religious blogs and other modern forms of religious marketing. But rather than promoting ways to address pressing problems such as poverty and world hunger, church blogs have become vehicles to advance political agendas with “hot-button” issues such as abortion and homosexuality.

So what does the future hold? For the megachurches, Twitchell predicts an implosion that already shows signs of being under way. For one thing, megachurches, by virtue of their expansion, are becoming part of the very thing they started out trying to avoid: the mainstream.

For another, he says, they have become too involved in politics, which can backfire when politics go awry. Then there’s the matter of celebrity pastors falling by the wayside either by scandal or retirement.

Finally, he writes, the biggest threat is market saturation. When a church ties its value to growth, sooner or later it will hit a brick wall. “In old-time denominations, growth was not proof of value; stability was,” he writes. “But the megachurch has no cushion to absorb that inevitable day when they have reached the last available seeker, and the balloon deflates.”

Incidentally, Twitchell considers himself a “cold Christian” or an “apathiest,” a term he borrowed from Atlantic Monthly. It means, in Twitchell’s words, someone who thinks religion has an important place in every culture but if its members believe they should proselytize, they should do so “very quietly and politely. Knock first.”

A pilot program in Florida believed to be the first in the nation for juvenile offenders has successfully avoided the separation of church and state controversies that have plagued some adult programs around the country and even shut down a prison fellowship in Iowa, said Jodi Lane, a UF criminologist who led the research.

“If other states can learn from Florida by anticipating the legal issues and addressing them before they start, they’re going to be in much better shape,” Lane said. “I would expect Florida to be a model for other states that want to set up their own juvenile faith-based programs.”

Unlike many other programs in the country that are exclusively Christian, Florida’s participants can select from other religions, Lane said. If a youth is Islamic, for example, the people running the program will find a volunteer from that faith to serve as a mentor, she said.

The other big constitutional issue — religious coercion — was not a concern here because the program was completely voluntary; interested juveniles and their parents signed a consent form agreeing to participate, she said.

As part of the Bush presidency’s focus on faith-based initiatives, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice received $3.5 million in 2003 to create a pilot faith- and community-based initiative within juvenile correctional facilities. At the state’s request, Lane and UF criminology professor Lonn Lanza-Kaduce evaluated the program two years later in five residential facilities for incarcerated youth, three for boys and two for girls.

Their initial results were published in the April edition of the journal Evaluation Review titled “Before You Open the Doors: Ten Lessons from Florida’s Faith and Community-Based Delinquency Treatment Initiative.” Findings on whether the treatment helped prevent offenders from committing new crimes are expected this fall after the youths will have returned to the community for at least six months, Lane said.

But so far, anecdotal evidence shows the program to be a positive experience, Lane said. Participants say their morale has improved, and staff report inmates are better behaved, she said.

“We know these kids are getting a lot of attention, which is helping them,” she said. “When you talk with them, they definitely let you know they feel people care about them.”

Lane said she believes the passion the staff have for helping youth, which is driven by their faith, gives them the determination to make sure the participants have whatever they need, even if it means going out and shopping for it themselves. Many left lucrative jobs for a position with no benefits because they believed so strongly in what they were doing, she said.

“They gave up their personal lives to make sure things ran smoothly,” she said. “It was not your typical institutional setting where people tend to work their shift and go home. I think there is something about the faith-based community that gives them energy to work with kids, and kids need people with energy rather than those who go to work every day for a paycheck.”

Recruiting enough mentors for the youths was one struggle the staff faced, she said.

Florida’s program departed from those in many other states in that it sought mentors from a variety of religions, Lane said. Other programs in the country tended to be Christian, whereas participants in Florida were allowed to select from any religion or choose a secular mentor from a community organization if they preferred that to a faith-based mentor, she said.

“There were Jewish kids, who were given a Jewish mentor, Muslim kids, who were matched up with a Muslim mentor, and others who were more nontraditional,” she said.

The biggest concern was whether the youths would feel pressured to participate in the program and Florida’s program was designed to prevent this from happening, Lane said.

The youths are allowed not only the choice of whether to participate, but they also were given the alternative of having something else to do, she said.

“If there is a Bible study, the kid not only gets to choose whether or not to go, but is also given another equally enticing opportunity instead of just sitting in a cell and being penalized for not taking part in the religious activity,” she said.

Also to Florida’s advantage is that its constitution allows only community donations to be used to buy religious items, such as Bibles or the Quran, she said.

Pilgrimages, retreats and conventions are fast becoming one of the most reliable and desirable forms of income for the travel industry, said Harrison Pinckney IV. He did the study for his master’s thesis in UF’s department of tourism, recreation and sports management. Participants usually bring along their families and stretch their visits over three to four days, making a mini-vacation out of the affair by shopping, visiting museums and eating out, Pinckney said. He is now working on a doctoral degree in recreation, parks and tourism at Texas A&M University.

“There may be 80,000 people in town, but they’re not the kind to show up at bars and drive home drunk,” he said. “Because they have their kids with them they might go to a family restaurant or catch a movie afterwards.”

Another advantage of these religious gatherings is they are less likely to be canceled because many churches’ bylaws require congregations to hold annual conventions, Pinckney said. “After 9-11 there was a decline in attendance at professional conferences, but the numbers stayed steady for church conferences and in some cases even increased,” he said.

Although greater attendance at large church-oriented events is part of a broad social trend, Pinckney focused on black churches in his study. Historically, the church has assumed great importance to blacks because it was one of the few places in society that welcomed them, particularly before desegregation, when black-owned businesses were rare, he said.

“More than just a church, it became whatever the African-American community wanted it to be — a civic center, an after-school program and then a summer camp, even a homeless shelter,” he said.

Pinckney distributed questionnaires at seven Church of God by Faith congregations in Florida and Georgia during 2004. A total of 102 participants returned the surveys at the end of the church service or gave them to their pastors the following week.

Eighty-two percent reported having traveled to at least one Church of God by Faith national event. Sixty-one percent said they attended the four-day national convention for its entire length, while 26 percent said they were there for three days. The remaining 13 percent of churchgoers reported going for two days, with no one reporting a shorter visit.

While at the conventions, churchgoers reported sampling a variety of outside events such as sightseeing, shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending local performances or sporting events. The most popular activity was shopping– 30 percent reported heading for retail outlets –followed by visiting family and friends, 21 percent. Attending sports events was least popular, attracting only 5 percent.

Like major sporting events, church-oriented special events have been a financial boon to cities, with some attracting more than 80,000 visitors at a time and generating as much as $18 million for the local economy, Pinckney said. MegaFest, a religious event in Atlanta, draws about 150,000 a year, he said.

Lori Pennington-Gray, director for UF’s Center for Tourism Research and Development and a professor in UF’s tourism, recreation and sports management department who supervised Pinckney’s research, said the travel industry is recognizing the importance of such events by assembling more meeting planners specializing in this type of market, she said.

Because church-oriented special events operate on such a grand scale, they must usually be planned at least a couple of years in advance, Pennington-Gray said. “That makes them less vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy than segments of the leisure market where people’s discretionary income is affected if the economy takes a downturn,” she said.

DeWayne Woodring, executive director of the Religious Conference Management Association headquartered in Indianapolis, said a survey conducted by his organization shows that the number of religious meetings grew 195 percent in the past 10 years.

“Meetings are becoming more and more important because within this increasingly complex and global society, people feel a need to meet with others with whom they share a common faith, bond or purpose,” he said.

So says a University of Florida population geographer who recently completed the first estimate of the Hasidic population based on the U.S. Census.

Geography professor Joshua Comenetz estimated today’s Hasidic population at about 180,000, just 3 percent of the approximately 6 million Jews in the U.S., in a recent paper published in the journal Contemporary Jewry. However, Comenetz calculated that the Hasidic population doubles every 20 years because Hasidic Jews tend to have many children. That’s occurring even as demographic studies show that the non-Orthodox Jewish population is flat or falling. If current trends continue, Hasidic and other growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups will constitute a majority of U.S. Jews in the second half of this century – a potentially profound cultural and political change.

“In demographic terms, Hasidic Jews are more similar to some highly religious Christian groups than liberal Jews,” Comenetz said. “They may also sympathize more with the Republicans than the Democrats on values questions. So, one outcome may be a change in the way Jews vote.”

This bodes a turn toward conservatism among American Jews, most of whom traditionally support the Democratic Party, Comenetz added. For example, most ultra-Orthodox Jews send their children to religious schools, which makes they more sympathetic to faith-based initiatives of the sort identified with the Republican Party.

Hasidic, which means “pious” in Hebrew, refers to a Jewish movement that believes in a strict interpretation of the laws and ethics of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Hasidic Jews frown on contraception, abortion and divorce, although they do not absolutely ban them. Hasidic Jews also tend to have large, traditional families, with most Hasidic women working in the home, although Hasidic women are not forbidden from entering the workplace.

Comenetz is not the first to try to estimate the national Hasidic population, which is centered in the New York area. But his estimate is the only one based on U.S. Census data, and the most recent data at that — the 2000 U.S. Census. The Census might seem an unlikely source of information for such research because it does not ask questions about people’s religious affiliation. In effect since the first Census in 1790, that policy is rooted in the constitutional separation of church and state.

What made Comenetz’s research possible was a question the Census does ask: “What language do you speak at home?” Hasidic Jews are rare among immigrant groups in that they continue to speak the native tongue of their Eastern European forebears today, many generations after their ancestors first came to America. That language is Yiddish.

Comenetz’s effort was more complicated than simply summing all Census-counted Yiddish speakers, however. That’s because not all Hasidic Jews speak Yiddish. And many elderly non-Hasidic Jews who immigrated to America from Eastern Europe through the post-World War II era also speak Yiddish. This population complicated the picture enough for Comenetz to find a way to isolate them from Hasidic Jews.

He did that by using other Census questions about age to narrow his focus to Yiddish-speaking children, counting about 40,000 between ages 5 and 17, most in metropolitan New York. Other information about Hasidic family structure allowed Comenetz to extrapolate the 40,000 children to 140,000 total Hasidic Jews.

That was in 2000, and Comenetz estimates the number has grown to 180,000 in 2006. There are about the same number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are not Hasidic. Unlike many Christian groups, such as Mormons, most Jews including the ultra-Orthodox do not seek converts, so the growth of their population is almost entirely due to births. It is not at all unusual for ultra-Orthodox families to have four, six or more children, Comenetz said.

In New York, the effects of the growth of the Hasidic population are already apparent, with Hasidic people leaving their traditional neighborhoods in Brooklyn to set up communities in rural suburbs. Hasidic Jews believe in living close together, within walking distance of a synagogue, so these settlements tend consist of closely spaced apartments or rowhouses – a far cry from the big-house, big-lawn American suburban archetype. As the population grows, New York can expect to see more such unique settlements, Comenetz said. “They do the opposite of suburban sprawl,” he said.

“There is an assumption that the ’Israeli lobby’ rests upon a monolithic, highly mobilized American Jewish community that makes Israel the No. 1 issue in American politics,” said Kenneth D. Wald, a UF political science professor who did the research with Bryan Williams, a UF graduate student in political science. “We found enormous variability within the American Jewish community in the extent to which Israel factors into domestic political thinking.”

Although Israel’s fate is an overriding political consideration for a small number of Jews in this country, many others consider it a nonissue, said Wald, whose paper has been accepted for publication in the July issue of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Most American Jews fall somewhere in between, he said.

The issue has received prominent attention recently with the March publication in the London Review of Books of a paper by two American political scientists. They claim the thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East derives largely from the activities of the “Israeli Lobby,” a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Newspaper editorial columns have since appeared debating the merits of the paper, which was written by John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on Internal Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Wald’s study looked at the extent American Jews incorporate Israel into their political thinking and what factors influence that tendency. He used a series of telephone surveys called the “culture polls” conducted by Zogby International, a polling firm led by an Arab-American. In 1999 and 2000, 589 Jewish participants were asked to answer a series of multiple-choice questions on subjects such as how important they consider U.S. support for Israel, the importance of candidates’ positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict to their voting decision and whether they had ever written a letter or made a telephone call to express their views on the Arab-Israeli conflict to a government official, newspaper or magazine.

“We found that the more people are integrated and involved in the ethnic community, based on cultural and social ties, the more likely they are to put Israel at the center of their political thinking,” Wald said.

The study showed the most important factors were synagogue attendance, Jewish pride and respondents’ age. Older Jews were much more likely than their younger counterparts to factor Israel into the political priorities for the United States, he said.

“Being older means that you have lived through a time when there was no state of Israel or when its survival was very much in doubt,” Wald said. “Young people never knew a time when there wasn’t a state of Israel and in most cases when that state didn’t seem to be something of a superpower.”

Younger Jews’ lack of attachment to Israel presents political challenges for pro-Israel organizations in the future, especially because American Jews comprise only 2 percent of the U.S. population, Wald said. “Older Jews who lived through the time when Israel was created and its survival was at stake are slowly passing out of the population and being replaced by a younger group for whom Israel does not have the same political priority,” he said.

Wald said he did the study because of his interest in the importance people attach to their ancestral homeland when they engage in politics in the United States. He believes the results show that Jews’ concern and mobilization for Israel are not different from other ethnic groups in the United States and cast doubts on the claims in Measheimer and Walt’s paper.

“There is a long history in this country of ethnic groups getting involved in the making of American foreign policy,” he said. “Typically, they try to influence the government to adopt policies that advance the interests of their homeland.”

For centuries, the American Irish community pressured the United States to push Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland, and today’s Cuban-American lobby exerts enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean as do Armenian-Americans on Turkey and Greek-Americans regarding Cyprus, he said.

“We all differ in the degree to which we are part of an ethnic community and how important it is to us,” Wald said. “Many Americans are Italian and that Italianness may manifest itself in eating habits and some family traditions, but I doubt if most Americans of Italian extraction could name the prime minister of Italy.”

In fact, talking about religion to comfort people who are not very spiritual can actually increase their fears of dying and what might lie beyond, said Monika Ardelt, a UF sociologist whose research appears in the March issue of Research on Aging.

The study of 103 relatively healthy older adults and 19 hospice patients in North Central Florida, all of whom were older than 60, found sharp differences between people who are “intrinsically” and “extrinsically” religious.

Those with an “intrinsic religious” orientation dedicated their life to God or a higher power and reported they were less afraid of death and experienced greater feelings of well-being than people who fit into the “extrinsic religious” category of using religion for external ends, such as a way to make friends or increase community social standing, Ardelt said.

“I think the take-home message is that if you cannot commit your life to God or a higher power, it is better to be nonreligious than to be religious for the wrong reasons,” she said.

“Extrinsically religious” people are more vulnerable at the end of life than non-churchgoers because they might be reminded in church that their lives have not been morally perfect, Ardelt said.

“Being exposed to the doctrines and teachings of their church, they knew what they were supposed to do, but they may not necessarily have been doing it,” she said. “So they may be more afraid of the payback when they die than people who don’t believe at all.”

Another reason personal commitment may be important is that church fellowship tends to decline in old age, Ardelt said. Elderly people in poor health may end up in nursing homes or assisted living facilities and be unable to travel to their old church, having to substitute it with an unfamiliar congregation that is physically closer or attended by their relatives, she said.

The study underscores the need to distinguish between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” religious orientations when looking at the effects of religiosity on people’s attitudes toward death and feelings of well-being, Ardelt said. Past studies have relied on measures such as what denominations people belong to, how frequently they attend church and how they rate the importance of religion in their lives; with little research done on hospice patients, she said.

Interestingly, the study found that being “intrinsically religious” did not have a direct effect on achieving a sense of purpose in life, although participating in shared spiritual activities did. These might include attending church, participating in Bible studies and watching religious television programming with others, Ardelt said.

“It’s not enough to feel that you have dedicated your life to God, you have to actually engage in spiritual activities,” she said. “This is kind of a counter argument to people who say, ‘I don’t need the church, I can be spiritual by myself.’ Apparently it’s being part of a community that creates a feeling of communion, of being in connection with a higher power that sustains a sense of meaning and purpose in life.”

The findings are important because many people mistakenly believe that bringing up the subject of religion with the elderly is helpful, particularly for hospice patients, when the opposite is actually true for people who are “extrinsically religious,” she said.

A minister who participated in the study unexpectedly turned out to fit such a religious bent. “When I asked if he engaged in spiritual activities, he said, ‘Well, not as much anymore, I’m retired,’” Ardelt said. “He ended up not being very spiritual at all.”

Ardelt said she believes the man was so busy during his career that he didn’t have time to seriously question his religion until later in life, when he had difficulty conceiving of a place like heaven being roomy enough for billions of people. “For these extrinsically religious people, there is some real existential struggle going on at the end of life,” she said.

Community-dwelling older residents were recruited from 18 close-knit social groups, including bowling leagues, garden clubs and religious congregations. They were surveyed between 1998 and 1999. Patients from a local hospice group were interviewed and asked to fill out a survey between 1999 and 2001.

The study’s effects were most pronounced in hospice patients, who naturally were more affected by thoughts of death, she said. Having “intrinsic religious” beliefs offered tremendous help for these terminal patients at the end of life. “The ‘religious extrinsic’ people often ask ‘Why me?’” she said, “’Intrinsically religious’ people don’t necessarily ask that question because they believe that God must have a reason.”

The society will promote critical inquiry into the relationships among human beings and their diverse cultures, environments, and religious beliefs and practices, according to its Web site, www.religionandnature.com.

“This is where scholars who are interested in the relationships between environments, religions and cultures can come and bring their own perspectives and their own interdisciplinary lenses into a broader conversation,” said Bron Taylor, UF Samuel S. Hill Eminent Scholar in religion, who is serving as interim society president.

About 100 people are expected to attend the society’s first conference April 6-9.

Taylor has been developing the idea for the organization for nearly a decade, but plans started to take shape after the publication of the Encyclopedia for Religion and Nature, which he edited and published in April.

“This past summer I was invited to meet with the European Network for Religion and the Environment to present a paper and talk about their initiative in Europe and ours in the States,” Taylor said. “I pitched the idea of creating an international society, and they were very keen on it. I then began to shop this idea around in the professional societies for religion and anthropology, environmental history and ethics.”

After receiving interest from those fields, Taylor organized a meeting for the society at UF that included scholars from Europe and across the United States. Participants began planning the society’s inaugural conference, “Exploring Religion, Nature, & Culture” next spring. Plans also are under way to begin publishing a professional journal for the study of religion, nature and culture in the first quarter of 2007.

“I don’t think any of these disciplines are adequately strong in the absence of the other ones,” Taylor said. “All too often people who are interested in these disciplines, if they are inadequately trained in the other areas, make unwarranted assumptions in the very premises on which their research is based.”

One of the ideas behind the international society is to connect researchers from these related areas for the benefit of collaborative research.

“There’s something in the face-to-face interchange and the argumentation and debate that’s valuable, and those informal conversations lead to collaborations and new research projects,” Taylor said. “If folks who work across disciplines never hang out together, some of those possibilities never will materialize.”

Taylor said researchers from several UF departments are leading the religion and nature initiative, including people from botany, natural resources and environment, anthropology and other researchers and graduate students in the religious studies department.

“I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary studies,” he said. “UF is very much an interdisciplinary place with a lot of people focused on the environment, so it’s a good place to spearhead these kinds of issues.”

A professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute says the environmental crisis is a challenge to every aspect of our culture.

“This new society will help to focus and further the groundbreaking work already under way as religious instructors, theologians and communities respond to the crisis,” said Roger S. Gottlieb. “I cannot think of any task more important for intellectuals who want their ideas to matter.”

Another reason to create the society is to explore the hypothesis that people’s religious attitudes and beliefs have something to do with how they relate to nature, Taylor said.

“I think that there’s at least some evidence that the hypothesis has merit, at least in some cases,” he said. “That means this emerging field has a lot to do with the flourishing of human beings and the life forms with whom we share this planet, so ultimately it is an academic field that has both practical and ethical implications and importance.”

Taylor expects membership will grow to several hundred in the first few years.

“For gays, Halloween is like a high holiday, it’s a major, major event,” said Jack Kugelmass, a UF anthropology professor who has studied the phenomenon. “Because it is about masquerade, dress-up and choosing one’s identity, Halloween has become very significant to the gay community.”

One of the most visible signs of the gay presence is the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, which began in the 1970s as a neighborhood celebration showcasing colorful, life-size puppets and has evolved into New York City’s answer to Mardi Gras, Kugelmass said. This grand urban spectacle, which straddles the line between civic festival and carnival with drag queens clad in outlandish transvestite costumes, attracts hundreds of thousands of parade watchers and pumps millions of dollars into the city’s economy, he said.

The parade has stimulated the growth of spin-off parades in other cities both in and outside the United States, said Kugelmass, who wrote a book about the village parade, “The Masked Culture” that was published several years ago by Columbia University Press.

As gays travel or move from place to place, it is natural for them to take their celebrations with them, Kugelmass said. “If they’ve visited New York or San Francisco and seen Halloween parades, then they are likely to want them in Melbourne or Hamburg,” he said.

Halloween has assumed special meaning for gays because many homosexuals experience tension in reconciling their needs with conventional beliefs, rituals and religions, Kugelmass said. That’s partly because gays traditionally have been excluded from various cultural observances, he said.

“Even if they would participate in mainstream religions, they needed something that was uniquely their own, which spoke to their own identity,” Kugelmass said. “Halloween does this with its emphasis on disguising gender with make-up and dress-up, as well as by allowing people to claim a gender, which gays find appealing.”

Other holidays have lost some credibility because of their ties to the past, Kugelmass said. For example, Independence Day may be questioned by some highly educated people who believe the negative side of patriotism leads to unnecessary wars, he said.

And gays have mixed feelings about religious holidays, Kugelmass said. For that matter, he said, what is an American religious holiday?

“Christmas is hardly a religious celebration, it’s a consumer holiday,” he said. “And does anyone understand the connection between Thanksgiving and its original intent? People know Thanksgiving as the kickoff to the holiday buying season.”

Nor does Halloween bear any resemblance to its pre-Christian roots in ancient Celtic religion, emerging today as a holiday that relates more to the issue of identity than it does to the spiritual world, he said. “The beauty of Halloween is it promotes playfulness and irony, in that things can appear to be one thing and actually be something else,” he said. “It adds to a made-up quality by addressing make-believe, choice and duality of identity. Beneath one identity is another identity. It’s all about masking and unmasking.”

Besides exhibiting a fluidity of male and female elements in their disguises, gay parade participants might experiment with cross-over identities in other imaginative ways, such as by fusing fruit or animal features with human ones, he said.

Kugelmass believes the ability to mold identity is healthy because it lets people know they have choices, freeing them from the constriction of having to be who they have always been. “It behooves us to think about those choices and relish the fact that we don’t have to mindlessly parrot the lives of our parents and grandparents,” he said. “They weren’t always such interesting lives.”

However they interpret Halloween, gays likely will have widespread influence on how the holiday is observed, Kugelmass said. “Whether this means Halloween will someday be celebrated in China, I don’t know, but the likely route of transmigration is through the gay community because the holiday has tremendous resonance with them,” he said.

Leigh E. Schmidt, a Princeton religious professor and author of “Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays” said Halloween is rich in cultural conflict and creativity, solidifying debates over sexuality, identity and religion. “No one has paid closer ethnographic attention to these developments than Kugelmass, and it is good to see him now pursuing the global consequences of these local celebrations,” he said.

Unable to testify, the mentally handicapped lacked organization and advocates to make their case, and often were faceless victims secretly murdered in asylums originally meant to help them, said Shane Stufflet, who did the research for his doctoral degree in history at UF. In contrast, the Jews pulled together to elicit sympathy by demonstrating that their murdered contemporaries were fellow human beings and Germans, he said.

“If you murdered a Jew, you were much more likely to get a sentence and get a stiffer sentence than if you murdered the mentally handicapped,” said Stufflet, whose study is the first to calculate the disparity. “The mentally handicapped were seen as a burden on society and so judges, and especially lay judges, did not consider their murders to be as great a crime.”

More than half of the Nazis tried for crimes against the mentally handicapped – 57 percent – were acquitted, said Stufflet, who now teaches at Rollins College, the University of Central Florida and Lake Mary High School. Of the 43 percent of defendants found guilty, only 1.6 percent received life sentences, none of which were served, he said.

In contrast, only 24 percent of the Nazis tried for crimes against the Jews were acquitted, with about 11 percent receiving life sentences, said Stufflet, who did most of his research at the state archives in Munich, Germany, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Because of their larger numbers and greater visibility in German society, Jews were seen as more “human” victims and the postwar judiciary was quick to condemn their deaths, Stufflet said. The same shift in attitudes that resulted in a smooth transition from “enemy” to “victim” for Jews did not occur with the mentally handicapped, he said.

“One was more than twice as likely to be acquitted for murdering a mentally handicapped person and nearly seven times as likely to receive a life sentence for killing a Jew,” he said.

In the 1950s and 60s, the German government denounced incidences of anti-Semitism, such as desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, but subtle prejudice against the mentally handicapped remains today, Stufflet said. Although laws have been passed to protect the rights of the mentally handicapped, they are not as fully integrated into public life as they are in the United States, he said.

One reason for this disparity is that Germany didn’t begin integrating the handicapped into public schools until the late 1970s, while the United States started doing so nearly two decades earlier as part of the civil rights movement, he said.

The first murders on the mentally handicapped were of children in asylums, around late 1939 or early 1940, about a year before those on Jews began, he said.

“Children were either starved or injected with Luminal or morphine and the killings were soon expanded to adults,” he said. “When the Nazis realized they couldn’t murder as many people as they wanted in that fashion, they started experimenting with gas.”

Basements in six asylums were modified to create gas chambers, with hookups added for diesel trucks to pump in carbon dioxide, he said.

Because the victims were hidden from view, many families were not suspicious when they received a death notice, Stufflet said. “The Nazis would send them a fake letter saying the family member had suddenly taken ill and been transported to another institution, and the next letter would state that the person had died,” he said.

An estimated 70,000 to 75,000 mentally handicapped children and adults were killed in the gassing program, with about 200,000 more dying from starvation or injection, Stufflet said. Unlike some Jews, who testified at various trials about the atrocities committed against them and won judges’ sympathy, the mentally handicapped were unable to make arguments on the witness stand because of their limitations, he said.

“Judges did not hear firsthand the dramatic and oftentimes brutal stories of how victims were selected, transported, stripped naked and led into gas chambers,” he said.

Patricia Heberer, historian at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said Stufflet’s research is important because these so-called “euthanasia crimes” are an understudied chapter of history.

The medical profession shielded its own, often falsely certifying the perpetrators as physically unable to stand trial, Heberer said. “These physicians, nurses and bureaucrats who administered the ‘euthanasia program’ often did get away with murder,” she said.

A new book by a University of Florida history professor explores the origins of the black Protestant church in America through the life of an 18th-century former slave named Rebecca Protten, who converted to Christianity and later became a missionary. Juneteenth, observed on June 19, commemorates when the last slaves in America were freed in Texas in 1865.

Because of their living conditions, many slaves looked to the church for reassurance and the possibility of a better life after death. The church also was the one place a slave could express himself or herself freely without the fear of punishment or death.

In his book, “Rebecca’s Revival,” professor John Sensbach argues that Protten‘s conversion to Christianity and preaching efforts among enslaved workers helped lay the groundwork for what would become the black church more than a century before emancipation in the United States.

“We know that the black church is the vessel of African-American culture and has been for several centuries,” said Sensbach, who began researching Protten and her connection with the black church in 2001. “The more I began to look at her, I realized that she was a very important figure who can help us to understand this larger issue.”

Sensbach found information on Protten’s life in records kept by the missionaries and writers from her time, translating them from German, Dutch and Danish. Through those records, he found that Protten was born around 1718 of mixed racial descent and was sold into slavery in the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands.

“There, the records say she had a religious experience, when she was very young, perhaps in early adolescence,” said Sensbach, whose book was published in March. “She was freed by her master and began to preach to women on her plantation around the same time.”

In 1733, missionaries from the German Moravian church began preaching to the St. Thomas slaves, and Protten became immersed in the movement, Sensbach said.

“She went to meet the missionaries on the island, and they realized she was already a preacher,” he said. “She was exactly what they were looking for, so she joined their movement and became a missionary to the enslaved women.”

Sensbach added that Protten’s involvement was crucial because the Germans did not know the language of the Caribbean islands and had a hard time reaching out to the slaves, who spoke a mixture of Dutch and African tongues.

“They depended on converts like Protten and others to join the movement to the plantations and recruit slaves,” he said. “It became an indigenous movement to convert to Christianity that Protten and other black preachers helped spread.”

Through his research, Sensbach found that Christianity became prominent in black society because it was a religion of empowerment and spiritual freedom that sustained them through the ravages of racism and slavery.

“Her life is important in a couple of ways,” Sensbach said. “She was an essential figure in generating the movement that would lead to the spread of black evangelical Protestant Christianity throughout the Americas. Second, her life was unique in that it was virtually impossible for a black woman to make the travels she made.”

Up to Protten’s time, there were many black Christians in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but most were Catholic because Protestants had had little success converting people of African descent, Sensbach said. When the evangelical German missionaries arrived on St. Thomas, they were on the forefront of trying to emulate what the Catholics had done. As a result, they established a beachhead through the efforts of Protten and others like her, making possibly thousands of converts in one corner of the Caribbean.

“This proved inspiring to the other Protestant evangelicals like Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians who looked at this experiment,” Sensbach said. “So they sent out missionaries in North America, during a time that’s known as the Great Awakening, when the origins of the black church in North America began.”

Protten’s role in the origins of black Christianity is echoed by Sensbach’s colleagues.

“Jon Sensbach’s bold historical imagination has produced an important book rich with fascinating insights about the role of African-Americans in the international movement of evangelical Protestantism and the centrality of women in this movement,” said Sylvia Frey, a history professor at Tulane University and author of several books on similar topics.

“Many universities in this country are just opening up to the idea of Hindu studies,” said Vasudha Narayanan, a religion professor who will serve as the center’s first director. “Since our program is interdisciplinary and we are not just looking at it through one set of lenses, I believe we will create new interest.”
Drawing from UF’s diverse resources, CHiTra will offer a series of interdisciplinary courses and lectures to UF students focusing on Hindu traditions and the arts, Hinduism and environmental concerns and Hinduism and health-related issues. It also will offer regular instruction in one of the oldest Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, which remains an official language of India. The acronym for the center, CHiTra, is the Sanskrit word for “beautiful work of art.”

The center will not initially offer an undergraduate major or minor, but will work toward offering a certificate program. Its first three courses will be offered in the fall — an honors course, Introduction to Hindu Culture, taught by Narayanan; Beginning Sanskrit, taught by graduate student Michael Gressett; and Second-Year Sanskrit, taught by Govinda Rangarajan, an adjunct professor who holds a doctorate in Sanskrit from Madras University in India.

The center will bring together faculty from across campus, collaborating extensively with the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures, the Asian Studies Program and the School of Theatre and Dance. It will have strong ties with Oxford and plans to co-host a series of lectures and programs for the research community, as well as possible faculty and student exchanges. The center also will collaborate with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi to pursue joint research projects in India and the possible exchange of visiting scholars.

The Gainesville community will benefit from CHiTra by attending sponsored art exhibits and dance and musical performances offered in conjunction with the Center for World Arts, the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art and Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. The center also aims to help expand the Hindu studies collection at UF’s Smathers Library.

“The center promises to provide important intellectual and artistic leadership in the internationalization of the university,” said Joan Frosch, an associate professor and assistant director of the School of Theatre and Dance who is serving on the new center’s advisory committee. “No U.S. institution, as far as I know, has such a center in place. I would expect CHiTra to play an increasingly national, if not international, role in the understanding of Hindu culture, its traditions and innovations.”

“This is a tribe that is very linked to their heritage and to their lands,” said Donna L. Cohen, who has taught at the University of New Mexico and has been teaching in UF’s School of Architecture since 1999. “This aviary will really become part of the landscape in New Mexico due to its cultural significance.”

Although the aviary, known as the Zuni Eagle Sanctuary, is the first of its kind in American Indian communities, the practice of caring for injured golden and bald eagles is intertwined with the history of the people, Cohen said.

Until the 1940s, it was common for each Zuni family to have its own eagle to care for outside their homes. But as eagle populations in the United States declined during the first half of the 20th century, the federal government curtailed unsupervised eagle care.

“The only way to get feathers then was to apply for them through a service in Colorado that was a repository for dead eagles,” said Steven Albert, the former director of the Zuni Fish and Wildlife Department in Zuni, N.M. “This led to a drastic cutoff in the supply of feathers.”

The Fish and Wildlife Department began working with the Zunis in the late 1990s to develop a way to easily collect feathers without having to apply for them.

“One option we came up with was to construct a facility for nonreleasable eagles,” Albert said. “This would be a place to care for eagles with broken wings or that have been (injured by electric shock) or that are just too old to survive in the wild.”

Albert said that while zoos would be ideal places to care for injured birds, the zoos prefer to keep birds that are not disfigured.
Enter the Zuni Eagle Sanctuary.

Although the birds in the Zuni aviary cannot be released, they are allowed to breed, parenting offspring that can be returned to the wild.

“The Zuni aviary keeps the eagles that are not capable of living on their own, and as they molt, the workers are allowed to collect their feathers for the tribal ceremonies,” he said.

Staff members collect the fallen feathers from these birds during their annual molt. The feathers are then shared among the religious leaders of the Zuni community for sacred ceremonial uses. In addition to continuing cultural traditions that have been in place for centuries, the aviary functions as a place to house and care for birds that otherwise would be euthanized.

Over the five years since its completion, the Sanctuary has grown to house 17 injured birds, and further expansion is being considered. The aviary currently is 100 feet long, 25 feet wide and 18 feet tall.

One important aspect of the project that Cohen stressed during the design phase was that the building be aesthetically appealing. Cohen and her husband, architect Claude Armstrong, who was her partner on the project, designed the aviary to be in harmony with its surroundings in northwestern New Mexico.

“The drawings we started with were all relatively simple because of the simplicity of the structure,” Cohen said. “We wanted it to reflect the natural area around it, and we made the decision that the materials would come as relatively local as possible.”

A reddish stone native to the area called Zuni sandstone was incorporated into the walls of the aviary, and lumber for the project was milled from local pine trees at the Zuni Community sawmill.

“The Zuni have a really beautiful way of building with the sandstone where they sort of lay it up so that the stone forms the walls of structures,” Cohen said. “It is a traditional practice that many of the Zuni today aren’t very familiar with, so while we were building the aviary, they started a program for the elders to teach how to lay up the sandstone.”

In addition, the aviary faces the Dowa Yalanne, the sacred Corn Mountain, a large mesa that dominates its Zuni surroundings. Cohen said the mesa has cultural significance to the Zuni, and the aviary was designed so the eagles could view the mesa from their cages.

Cohen’s work has not only given the Zuni a way to continue their heritage, it also has earned them international recognition and respect from other tribes.

“Because of the nature of the project, we were able to get grants from the federal government’s National Endowment for the Arts for the design fee,” Cohen said. “Grants from private sources funded the materials and labor.”

Models of the aviary are traveling the United States as part of an exhibit for the Premio Internazionale Dedalo Minosse award for architecture, an Italian award that celebrates the architect/client relationship. Photos of the aviary are included in the show, which tours internationally.

“This is not just about the Zuni Pueblo but about other tribes as well,” said Edward Wemytewa, a Zuni Pueblo tribal councilman. “Our eagle aviary shows other tribes with a heritage of eagle husbandry that they also have the flexibility of continuing their traditions as we are planning to do for future generations.”

The real key to contentment and satisfaction is finding a purpose in life, says University of Florida Institute on Aging researcher Monika Ardelt.

Her study, which was presented Sunday at the Gerontological Society of America annual meeting in Chicago, showed that people who had a feeling of purpose in life were not only more likely to experience a general sense of well-being but also tended to exhibit fewer depressive symptoms and fear death less. They also were less likely to avoid the topic of death.

“This study showed you can’t just go to church and then expect you will feel better if it doesn’t lead to a purpose in life,” said Ardelt, an associate professor of sociology at UF. “Just going to church or just being religiously affiliated might actually be harmful if it doesn’t result in a purpose in life.”

The study’s results may be particularly relevant since the events of Sept. 11. Americans have been flocking to church and prayer services, and those of all faiths have sought refuge in religion, looking for strength to cope with the devastating events of recent months and for help to calm their fears.

For the study, 107 relatively healthy, socially active North Central Floridians 58 years and older were surveyed using 215 questions compiled from standardized assessment measures. The questions determined things such as religious affiliation, participation in shared religious activities, degrees of religiousness, fear and other attitudes toward death, feelings of general well-being and purpose in life. Ardelt then used the responses to identify relationships between the factors.

When all other factors were controlled for, the research surprisingly found that simply having a religious affiliation tended to increase participants’ fear of death.

The findings also showed that people who turned to religion only in times of need, prayed because they were taught to or felt that religion was less important than other aspects of their lives - termed extrinsic religiosity - actually tended to fear death and to avoid thinking about it. Intrinsic religiosity - a commitment of one’s life to God or a higher power - did not directly influence these attitudes toward death.

Those who felt they had a clear purpose in life, had discovered satisfying goals and believed their lives had been worthwhile, however, tended not to fear death or to avoid thinking about it. Participants who felt this sense of purpose also were less likely to experience symptoms of depression and had a greater sense of well-being. Intrinsically religious participants were much more likely to feel this sense of purpose than those the survey identified as extrinsically religious.

“If religion leads to a purpose in life, it will help you cope and reduce fear of death. But for people who just go to church once a week, sit there for an hour and then forget about it - if religion doesn’t lead to a purpose in life - then it will not help,” said Ardelt, who points out that there are other ways, such as family and career, for people to find that much-needed life focus.

“That’s the paradox. People who find meaning and purpose in life are more ready to let go. And those people who have the feeling that time is running out, and that they should have accomplished something and didn’t, can’t really let go,” she said.

Intrinsically religious participants also showed a strong tendency to approach death positively and to believe in and look forward to life after death. Extrinsic religiosity had no effect.

Although the number of participants was relatively small, the results seem to point to the need for people to become more intrinsically motivated through spiritual nurturing and self-reflective thought. Current events may provide an opportune time to accomplish this, Ardelt said.

“I think an infusion of spirituality may be needed,” she said. “People need to look inwardly and observe themselves - look at things from different perspectives and not just from the outside. If they do that, they tend to see a deeper truth than just what is obvious.”

The social scientific study of the contributions that religiosity and spirituality play in well-being in later life has been one of the major advances in gerontology in the last 20 years, said Susan McFadden, professor and chairman of the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Previously, such issues were avoided, ignored and even rejected as legitimate topics for research, she said.

“Religiosity and spirituality are multidimensional and complex in their influence on well-being,” McFadden said. “It’s wonderful that current researchers like Monika Ardelt are pointing out their role in older adults’ responses to the challenges and contingencies of their lives.”