But how does hearing diverse languages affect language comprehension and processing?

In her new research, “Foreign-accented Speaker Identity Affects Neural Correlates of Language Comprehension” published in the May 2017 Journal of Neurolinguistics, Sarah Grey, Ph.D., found that a listener’s ability to identify foreign-accented speech affects their brain’s grammatical and semantic processing.

“In our daily lives, we’re interacting with people who are potential non-native speakers of a language, but we don’t have a lot of knowledge about how native speakers are processing what they hear,” said Grey, an assistant professor of linguistics and Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

The study that Grey conducted with Janet G. Van Hell, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and linguistics at Pennsylvania State University, examined the brain activity of 29 monolingual native English-speaking college students living in central Pennsylvania, where English is mostly spoken. None of the participants were currently studying a foreign language and all of them reported limited experience hearing foreign-accented speech.

In the study, participants were told that they were going to be hearing two people talk about their friends’ lives. The task was to listen to sentences related to their discussion. They were not told that the sentences were going to be spoken by a native English speaker and a non-native Chinese-accented speaker, and there was no prior mention of foreign accents, grammar, or semantics.

Some of the pre-recorded declarative sentences, which were delivered by two female speakers, were grammatically and semantically correct. However, other sentences had a grammatical error in English subject pronouns (“Thomas was planning to attend the meeting, but she missed the bus to the school”) or a semantic error (“Kaitlyn traveled across the ocean in a cactus to attend the conference.”)

The researchers examined how the participants processed native and foreign-accented sentences through two methods: First, the neurocognitive technique of event-related potentials (ERPs), which are acquired with electroencephalogram, or EEG data. This allowed them to measure the electrical activity of the brain as listeners were processing the sentences they heard.

“One of the advantages of EEG is that you’re getting a closer look at brain processing in real time,” said Grey. “That’s a very fine level of detail that we don’t always get when we’re looking exclusively at behavioral data.”

Secondly, researchers measured sentence comprehension, language attitudes, and accent perception among the 29 listeners being tested.

The results from Grey’s study showed that being able to recognize foreign-accented speech seems to affect not only semantic processing, but also aspects of processing grammar. Both groups of listeners showed reduced semantic processing of foreign-accented speech compared to native-accented speech. However, for processing the grammar, the patterns of the two groups of listeners differed, she said.

“Listeners who could successfully identify foreign-accented speech had more active brain responses during grammar processing than the listeners who couldn’t identify the accent,” said Grey.

 A global reality

As the United States continues to grow as a culture where many different languages are spoken and heard, Grey said her research on language comprehension is providing a deeper understanding of how bilinguals and monolinguals process the language around them.  According to Grey, these changes are also reflective of a global reality.

She said she doesn’t have to look much further than the Bronx to see the impacts of multilingualism. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey, 60.1 percent of Bronx residents speak a language other than English.

“Fordham is located in a linguistically rich area, which is incredibly attractive [for my research],” she said.

Most recently, Grey set up an EEG laboratory for Language and Multilingualism Research at the Rose Hill campus to conduct more experiments on language learning and comprehension— with the first set of data collection planned for later this year.

“We’d like to continue to look at language processing in groups of bilinguals to see if their own statuses as bilingual speakers also impact their brain responses,” she said.

Challenging misconceptions

Through her research on language processing, Grey hopes to also challenge misconceptions about foreign-accented speech.

“Oftentimes hearing foreign accentedness, or even dialectic accentedness, brings up a preconceived set of biases,” she said. “People often assume that the person may not be a high proficiency speaker of the language, may be brand new to a language, or that they may have ideological differences.”

Grey’s own experiences learning Spanish as a native English-speaking high school student, and later at the undergraduate level, provided her with a well-rounded perspective on language learning and comprehension, she said.

“It was through my own foreign language experience that I got interested in the more technical aspects of language study related to linguistics,” she said. “And I just followed that to where I’m at now.”

Grey plans to use Fordham’s EEG laboratory for Language and Multilingualism Research as a gateway for students to learn how multilingualism is transforming not only the world, but the Bronx community in which the Rose Hill campus is based.

“Most people around the world are bilingual or multilingual, or live in a context where bilingualism and multiculturalism are a daily reality,” she said.

“[The lab] gives students a different view of language learning and comprehension because we’re using neuroscience methods to examine foreign language learning and bilingual language processing. That’s kind of a novel way to think about [the study of]modern languages.”

Daisy Deomampo, PhD, an assistant professor of anthropology, has spent the better part of a decade researching transnational ART and commercial surrogacy. Her forthcoming book, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India, is an ethnographic study of commercial ART—including egg donation, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogacy—in India.

On one side of the practice are the commissioning parents who travel to India from all over the world to visit clinics that offer commercial surrogacy arrangements. What primarily draws many of them to India is cost: In the United States, gestational surrogacy can reach sums of $150,000, compared to between $25,000 and $40,000 in India.

On the other side are Indian women who are commissioned as egg donors or surrogate mothers. In the case of gestational surrogacy, an embryo is created through IVF using sperm and egg from the commissioning parents (or third party egg or sperm providers) and then implanted in the surrogate mother’s uterus. She carries the fetus for the nine months of pregnancy, during which she remains under the care of a doctor. Once she gives birth, she gives the baby to the commissioning parents.

These practices raise complex questions about motherhood. Who can be considered the mother in the case of gestational surrogacy? Is it the woman who gestated the fetus and gave birth? The woman who ultimately raises the child? Is it the person who contributes her DNA?

“It challenges our preconceived ideas about basic social categories like the family and motherhood,” she said.

Moreover, Deomampo said, “The dominant discourse in the media suggests this is a win-win situation for everyone involved—in the end the intended parents get their baby, and the surrogate earns much-needed income. But as an anthropologist, I know that human experiences are more complex than that. And the trope of the ‘win-win situation’ only conceals the inequalities embedded in transnational surrogacy.”

The questionable ethics of surrogacy

By 2008, when Deomampo first traveled to Mumbai for her research, India had become a global hub for commercial surrogacy. However, the industry operated within murky legal and ethical waters, and was deeply misunderstood.

For one thing, surrogacy can be dangerous, Deomampo said. In addition to the normal risks associated with pregnancy, the women undergo hormonal treatments for which the long-term consequences are unknown. Nearly all of the women give birth via caesarean section, which is a riskier form of childbirth.

“The industry is not regulated, and there’s no one keeping track of how many times women donate eggs or become surrogates,” Deomampo said.

Even though surrogate mothers can earn up to $6,000 per pregnancy—an ample figure for many of the families that Deomampo met—the sum is rarely enough to free families from the poverty that often drives them to surrogacy. For instance, in order to have the full amount needed to purchase a home, Deomampo said, one surrogate had to sell some of her family jewelry.

Even the promise of financial relief—however brief—is complex, said Deomampo.

“Some women saw it as an opportunity and felt it was life-changing—they were providing a service and they were making good money,” she said. “But other women felt it was a degrading experience. They were subjected to a host of medical interventions they didn’t feel comfortable with, and very few ever met the parents who were going to take the babies.”

Surrogacy and race

As an anthropologist, Deomampo is particularly curious about the impact that transnational commercial surrogacy has on racialization—the process of ascribing a racial identity to an individual or a group. In cases in which non-Indian parents pay an Indian woman to carry their child, then, how do they make sense of their connections with each other? How does racialization function in these relationships, especially in light of the fact that commissioning parents and surrogates rarely meet?

“The different people involved tend to rely on these racial constructions to justify why they’re participating in surrogacy and why it exists . . . Race keeps everyone neatly separated,” Deomampo said. “But the construction of race is a dynamic process. It’s not fixed . . . and it’s inherent to the unequal relations at the heart of transnational surrogacy.”

“I admire actors so much. They bare their soul. They rip their skin open, take their heart out, and go like this—” said JoAnne Akalaitis, her hand outstretched. “Night after night after night. It’s amazing what they do.”

The significance of one’s own story is at the core of this year’s advanced acting class, thanks to the leadership of Akalaitis, the fifth Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre.

“I think the bottom line with acting is emotion,” said Akalaitis, an award-winning director. “What an actor uses is his or her imagination and personal history—especially that history—to invent their characters.”

A “giant in American theater,” as Fordham Theatre program Director Matthew Maguire described her, Akalaitis is the second director to be named to the chair, following Kenny Leon in 2014. Over her decades-long career, which includes five Obie Awards and a Drama Desk award for direction and sustained achievement, Akalaitis has become renowned both for her original work and for her reimagining of classic works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Beckett, and others.

Creating a character

In her class, Creating a Character, Akalaitis is helping Fordham acting students delve deep into their art. The students work together on scenes from plays, paying special attention to believability, honesty, understanding storyline, and being in touch with both one’s body and one’s emotions. To do this, actors must go back into their own past experiences. By drawing on real emotions, actors can truly empathize with their characters, rather than merely impersonating them.

“If you’re 18 years old, you’ve got 18 years to work with,” Akalaitis said. “A lot can happen in 18 years.”

Before becoming a director, Akalaitis spent 22 years as an actor. She studied with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Open Theater in New York, and with acting virtuoso Jerzy Grotowski. From Grotowski she gained her appreciation for the “medium” actors use to create their art: namely, their personal histories.

Eventually, though, Akalaitis realized that she did not want to spend her career relentlessly revisiting the past—nor did she like acting very much.

“I only liked rehearsal, not performing,” she said. “I was interested in the process, not in repetition.”

Still, her work as an actor became the foundation of her ethos as a director. Theater, she believes, is an “unlonely pursuit.” It is unique in the sense that it is a collaborative process. Each stakeholder in a play—from directors, to playwrights, to actors—has an equally important role in bringing the story to life.

It was this philosophy of collaboration that she had in mind when she founded the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines theater company in 1970 with her ex-husband, composer Philip Glass. Located in New York City’s East Village, the company is an artist-driven coalition dedicated to experimental theater.

“Actors could become writers, writers could become directors, directors could become designers,” she said of Mabou Mines, where she remains a mentor in the resident artist program. “We supported each other in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t ever have to ‘break into’ any [new undertaking]. It was there for me.”

Teaching the next generation of characters

Akalaitis has had scores of young actors under her tutelage. Before occupying the chair endowed by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, Akalaitis has done workshops and taught at various universities, including Yale, Harvard, and her alma mater, the University of Chicago. She also holds two named professorships—the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College and the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard.

“I like being in urban universities. It feels as if the world is passing through,” she said.

Her stint at Fordham marks her first experience at a Jesuit school (“Though, [in high school]I was an incredible fan of the St. Ignatius basketball team on the west side of Chicago,” she noted), and she says she can appreciate the differences.

“I’m impressed at the diversity here [at Fordham],” she said. “There’s a variety of types and styles and ways of thinking. It feeds into a very refreshing creative energy… And the camaraderie between students in the theatre program is inspiring.”

Meanwhile, Akalaitis is also working on a play she has called Bad News! i Was There…, a compilation of messenger speeches—the bearers of bad news—from classical plays.

It’s the sort of pursuit that she wouldn’t be able to turn down even she wanted to.

“Every once in a while I make these announcements that I’m giving up theater for good,” she said. “I call people and tell them I’m giving it up, but no one takes it that seriously.”

“So, [in the case of Bad News,]about two years ago I’d given it up again when someone from Poets House called and asked me to do something for the River to River Festival. I said, ‘No, I’m not in the theater anymore.’

“But then I had an idea for a new show.”

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history, wants to vastly expand that understanding of the system—particularly its role in the South American nation of Brazil, which had the distinction of being the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery in 1888.

An expert in Iberian Atlantic history, Miki has looked at Brazil’s connection to slave trading firms in the United States, to slave traders in West Central Africa, and to British abolitionists.

The picture of slavery as a national institution has been too small, she said. “It’s very exciting to be able to look at the history of slavery in a more transnational way.”

Though she’s originally from Tokyo, Miki became fascinated in college with the performing arts of the African diaspora, and later took classes at the Ailey School. A former practitioner of the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira, Miki went to Brazil and found the country to be ideal for her research.

When she began researching 19th-century slave resistance in Rio in 2006, however, she stumbled upon numerous stories of indigenous rebellions. This was puzzling, she said, because there’s a very strong narrative in Latin American nations with large black populations that indigenous people were wiped out in the 16th and 17th centuries by Columbus, the Conquistadors, disease, and famine.

“I began to realize that in fact, the history of indigenous people in Brazil is very much a missing piece of history,” she said. “They were enslaved and lived and worked alongside slaves of African descent until the eve of the 20th century. For too long we had presumed that African slavery had expanded into ‘empty’ lands, which in fact were indigenous territories.” These histories, long separated, are in fact deeply connected.

Bringing these stories to light now is important, she said, because they challenge enduring popular narratives in Brazil. In The Masters and the Slaves (1946), for instance, sociologist/anthropologist Gilberto Freyre argued that the country is a “racial democracy”—composed of the race mixture between black, Portuguese, and indigenous people—and because of that, there is no racial tension in Brazil.

But just because people are of mixed race doesn’t mean there was or is no conflict, Miki said.

“It’s still important to look at the actual history of Brazil’s black and indigenous peoples. You don’t want to just look at the end result of a mixed society and celebrate it; but also look at how such race mixture might have occurred,” she said.

Her current project, which she worked on during a spring fellowship at Yale University, focuses on the overlapping geographies of the Atlantic World.

“I’m really interested in geography, not just in the physical sense of space or terrain, but also in the ways people conceptualize space and how they give meaning to space,” she said.

One of those geographies—the Middle Passage—can also be defined through narratives, such as that of two West African men whose stories Miki found in crumbling, barely legible scripts written in 19th-century Portuguese. Their stories about their journey from Lagos, Nigeria to Bahia, Brazil, and another set of documents pertaining to a slave ship from Angola bound for Rio de Janeiro, offer a rare glimpse into that horrific experience.

Further complicating their story is the fact that one of the ships was in fact illegal, and its interception before it arrived in Rio caused a diplomatic uproar at the time.

“I want to look at the Atlantic world as a place of overlapping geographies of personal narratives of capture, of slave ships, as well as capital, and this political movement of abolitionism.”

This challenge to think about slavery in new ways extends to Miki’s teaching too, in courses like Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America and the Atlantic World, and Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World. For example, she wants students to understand that the abolition of slavery was not an inevitable outcome; many places, from Cuba and Haiti to Puerto Rico and Brazil, wanted to preserve slavery while speaking of equality. It was the enslaved people themselves who challenged slaveholders’ hypocrisy and fought for their own emancipation.

“History is not about just facts. It’s all about competing narratives, and is very much about the present. If we think about what’s been happening in the United States recently with #blacklivesmatter, it’s very hard to separate it from the past,” she said.

However, in 1521 the Spanish conquistadors arrived, bringing with them foreign diseases and advanced weaponry, and the city succumbed. A letter from Hernán Cortés, who led the expedition through Mexico, to King Charles V of Spain reports that Tenochtitlan had fallen and that his army had “destroyed and razed it to the ground.”

There is one problem with Cortés’ account, though, says Barbara Mundy, PhD: it isn’t true.

The Aztec empire endures

Mundy, a professor of art history who specializes in pre-Columbian America, takes Cortés to task in a new book released this summer, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas Press, 2015). In it, Mundy argues that the fall of the mighty Aztec empire was not a clear-cut victory for Spain. Tenochtitlan was not utterly destroyed by the conquistadors. Moreover, it remained a distinctly Amerindian city ruled by Aztec elites decades after the Spanish invasion.

“The Spaniards presented themselves as totally self-sufficient and in charge once they conquered Tenochtitlan, but it wasn’t like that,” said Mundy, who is the co-creator of the NEH-funded website Vistas, a digital collection of visual culture in Spanish America, and a fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

“There were 300 Spaniards and all around them were tens of thousands of conquered natives. So there was a delicate balance to maintain.”

The balance that was created, said Mundy, was more of a “working relationship” in which the native elite was given just enough power to keep the city running. The Spaniards still depended heavily on the Aztecs to maintain functionality.

Mundy first noticed this historical discrepancy while perusing ancient Aztec texts (she has studied the Aztec language of Náhuatl). Although the famed Tenochtitlan king Moctezuma was killed during the conquest, his reign did not end with his death, Mundy said. His descendants ruled for decades afterward, keeping the Aztecs squarely in power.

“Part of the reason they were so powerful was because they controlled the labor. When you needed 60,000 workers to do something, the Spanish viceroy couldn’t just clap his hand and make it happen—but the Aztec overlord could,” Mundy said.

The ecological genius of Tenochtitlan

Unlike the invading Spaniards, the Aztecs, who called themselves the Mexica (pronounced meh-SHEE-kah), were also master urbanists in an ecologically difficult region. Built on an island in the middle of a saltwater lake, Tenochtitlan drew its potable water from a system of dikes the Mexica built to collect and preserve fresh water that flowed in from the West. These dikes also helped during the rainy seasons, when Tenochtitlan was prone to flooding.

The city included a network of canals and aqueducts to irrigate massive chinampas (floating gardens) that the Mexica cultivated and to dispose of waste in order to curb the spread of water-born diseases such as cholera.

“The Mexica had very sophisticated knowledge of their environment,” Mundy said. “They offer a positive model for us today as we deal with drought and climate change. I think we can take some lessons from the Mexica about how to better cohabitate with Mother Earth and live in our world in a less destructive way.”

A confluence of histories

The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan also describes the Mexica’s brutality—they are infamous for offering human sacrifices to their gods. And yet, Mundy points out in her book, this style of warfare—albeit brutal—was far nobler than that of their European counterparts.

“Mexica warfare was fought among men as a valiant exercise. The idea was to capture your enemies alive, because the most noble thing you could do was bring your captives back and sacrifice them in your temple,” she said.

“The Spaniards were very different. They defeated the Mexica by breaking the water system in Tenochtitlan and starving everyone into submission—including women and children, whom the Mexica would never harm in battle, because behaving like that would compromise their sense of what it means to be human. So, to the Mexica, the Spaniards were horrible barbarians.”

Mundy’s message in the book, and in her research overall, is frank: History does not belong solely to the winners. We have to be attentive to other historical accounts—from both the conquered as well as the conquerors.

“There’s never just one historical narrative. The victors may get to tell their story first, but there are these other enduring stories that belong to other groups of people, and it’s important to understand that those histories have legacies that influenced the way the world is shaped today.”

Thanks to social media, an up-and-coming enterprise known as peer-to-peer (P2P) lending can skip the financial middleman and connect borrowers directly with lenders. The perks of P2P lending include lower interest rates for borrowers, higher returns for lenders, and increased access to loans for people who otherwise cannot get one.

“P2P lending is meant to mitigate financial exclusion by giving consumers access to funds that they might not otherwise have access to,” said Komarova, an assistant professor of marketing. “But we’re finding that despite these good intentions, some groups of people are actually excluded based on absolutely random factors.”

Study finds “some really quirky effects”

Komarova, whose research focuses on consumer behavior, teamed up with Gabelli colleague Laura Gonzalez, PhD, an assistant professor of finance, to find out how P2P investors make lending decisions.

Using a simulated P2P site (“Lendi”) that they created, Komarova and Gonzalez presented lenders with the profiles of potential borrowers. The profiles contained only as much information as real P2P sites include, which is typically a photo of the borrower, loan size and maturity, classification of loan purpose, borrower credit rating, and an explanation of why the money is needed.

The pair found that in the absence of the extensive background information that banks collect about potential borrowers, P2P lenders tended to rely on certain personal factors, such as age, to guide their decisions. For instance, lenders tended to give less money to younger borrowers than to older borrowers, simply based on perceived life experience.

However, when it came to middle-aged people, for whom life experience was not as clear-cut of a determinant, Komarova and Gonzalez found that lenders relied on “some really quirky effects.”

They found that female lenders were less likely to loan money to an attractive woman (a phenomenon termed the “beauty is beastly” effect) and male lenders were less likely to loan money to a financially or professionally successful man with an outstanding credit rating—even if these borrowers were equally or more qualified than their less attractive and successful counterparts, respectively.

But when the sexes were reversed—women loaning to men and men loaning to women—the attractiveness and status effects disappeared.

“It’s not just about attractiveness, though—there’s something more operating there,” said Komarova, who as a marketing scholar also has extensive training in psychology. “These decisions are subconscious, even evolutionarily-based.”

Innate competitiveness drives decisions

According to Komarova, these psychological quirks stem from the competitiveness written into our DNA. Men perceive successful men as a potential threat, as do women vis-à-vis other attractive women. Even though we may rationally know that this is not true, we nonetheless experience a subconscious slump in confidence when we encounter our primitive rivals.

Unfortunately for the potential borrower, the momentary slump in confidence that the lender feels gets misjudged as a bad “gut feeling” about the borrower’s application. This becomes even more relevant if the lender is wading through numerous applications, because he or she relies more on those initial “gut feelings” to speed up the decision process.

“In the absence of objective information [or in a time crunch], visceral reactions often guide our decisions—that is, that immediate sense of this ‘feels right’ or ‘feels wrong,’” she said. “However, these intuitions about this borrower can be based on completely random factors.”

Komarova and Gonzalez published papers on their findings in two prominent journals, the International Journal of Bank Marketing and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. The next leg of the research will examine whether organizations that use P2P platforms demonstrate similar quirks when screening potential borrowers as compared to individual lenders.

“We’re hoping this research can educate P2P platform users not only to protect companies, investors, and borrowers, but also to help shape public policy and support these platforms so that everyone’s rights and opportunities are maximized,” Komarova said.

For Roman Catholics who have spent a lifetime imagining God as a father figure and praying in the name “Father,” ” Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” this gender reversal might sound jarring.

But Shannon McAlister, PhD, studies those saints and Doctors of the Church who ask: “Why?”

McAlister, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE), explores the use of female language to describe God—God as “her” instead of “him”—particularly within the western patristic and medieval Catholic tradition.

Despite the unfriendly conditions that women often endured during the Middle Ages, McAlister has found ample evidence that medieval theologians embraced diversity in the gendered language they used to refer to God.

“There are many scripture passages that refer to God with a variety of female terminology,” said McAlister, who teaches in GRE’s Christian Spirituality program. “For instance, in the Wisdom Literature, wisdom is sometimes portrayed as a divine figure, and depicted in female terms—sophia in Greek, or chokhmah in Hebrew. Other passages describe God as conceiving and giving birth.

“My work is focused on retrieving the history of those passages and showing that this language isn’t just on the margins of medieval theological thought—it persists at the center of institutional medieval theology.”

A retrospective study such as this is important within the field, McAlister said. Because modern Catholic thought is very much grounded in tradition, the insights of past scholars still carry weight in current theological debates. At the same time, the Church’s updated, more progressive views about gender equality create a dilemma for some contemporary theologians, who struggle between upholding tradition on the one hand and feeling dissatisfied with exclusively male language on the other.

By uncovering scriptural interpretations that employ female imagery and the theological scholarship based on these images, McAlister offers a model for thinking and talking about God in a more expansive way. And this, some feminist theologians say, may help set the tone for how women are regarded in the church.

“In all of the medieval texts I’ve studied, there are multiple instances of using female imagery for God, both in the grammatically feminine words of the text itself and in the images inspired by the text… for instance, God as creatrix sapientia, literally, ‘Creatress Wisdom’,” she said.

“These scripture passages that refer to God in female terms… can stand as precedents within our current speech for God.”

McAlister pointed to a medieval discussion over whether God might be referred to as “Mother” or “Daughter” in the same sense as “God the Father” and “God the Son.” The idea was ultimately rejected based on the medieval understanding of biological fatherhood and motherhood—that the father is the primary genitor who provides the form for a child, while the mother is a secondary genitor who passively receives that form without playing the active role in conception.

On this reasoning, motherhood is inferior to fatherhood—and an inferior descriptor for God.

“Using female language for God could help women appreciate their inherent dignity as reflections of God,” McAlister said. “However, there’s more we need to do to help women understand their dignity and move into roles that express that, or to create environments in which women are valued equally.”

For modern Catholics, the increasing recognition of women’s equality means that a wider vocabulary for God is a practice that many contemporary theologians advocate. While that may not resolve all issues relating to gender equality, it can be a good start.

“I think that retrieving the history of this type of speech about God provides an example for those who wish both to preserve the wisdom of the Christian tradition and also to broaden their images for God to include female as well as male,” she said.

“You would have people handing you fliers (on the street) about church services, all-night prayer vigils, and all kinds of things having to do with religion,” said Casteline, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies. “Half the day Saturday is filled up with televised sermons. A little stand selling food would have a name like ‘23rd Psalm Snacks.’”

“Religion is very much a part of the public sphere. It’s a part of the common discourse through mass media,” she said. “Literally, you see it everywhere.”

Such practices offer one example of how global Christianity is being reshaped by people from the developing world who are actively using mass communication tools to build their churches in their home countries and abroad, said Casteline.

Casteline’s trip to Ghana was part of her dissertation research into media use by Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora—in particular, those in Aurora, Colorado. One pastor, for instance, used cable access television to film his weekly service and send it to stations around the country, complete with subtitles and his web address scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

He also ran a radio show and a toll-free prayer line that fielded calls from as far away as Toronto. His congregation, meanwhile, numbered only about 50.

“You don’t see a church of 50 members doing anything like that” in America, Casteline said. “Most small churches have maybe a website that might get updated … every blue moon, once a year, but for the most part, American churches are not very media savvy.”

She’s seen Ghanaian Pentecostals using a variety of media in America. Pastors she has interviewed reach out to her regularly via text message and voice mail. Young Pentecostals in the Bronx started a Pinterest page that reflects the “Afropolitan” experience of Africans who have lived in diaspora for years, she said. Others are promoting their message through Facebook pages, tweets, and online videos.

These and other practices are an outgrowth of the “heavily mediated environment” in Ghana, she said.

“Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora are replicating practices found in the homeland, and … they are also going beyond what’s done in the homeland in order to take advantage of resources found in North America (and) Europe,” Casteline said. “As these populations increase in North America and in Europe, and as they gain access to more and more resources … we will see a change in North American Christianity as a whole. That change is already being felt in Europe, in that more African Christians are going to church and more are participating in the Christian life than are the European natives,” she said.

One reason African Pentecostals are at the leading edge of this proselytizing is the example set by televangelists, mainly Pentecostal, who came to West Africa in the 1970s, Casteline said. African pastors adopted this Western model, turning to television, printed brochures, and eventually other types of media.

Casteline plans to further study those Ghanaian Pentecostal communities abroad that not only use media well but also show a strong international bent.

“A lot of times they’ll start the church in their living room with friends and family, and friends of friends,” she said, “Then they [create]these ties with other churches around the world.” Sometimes the new networks will play host to each other’s pastors, she said.

“The churches have this way of worshiping and way of practicing Christianity that is just very different from traditional Western ways,” she said. “Even a storefront church will be called something like ‘World Tabernacle’ or ‘International House of Prayer.’ And literally, it’s 50 people. It’s a completely different mindset.”

Over the summer she visited churches in London and the Netherlands and interviewed pastors. Next year she’ll go to Padua, Italy, where Pentecostals are already making their mark in the public sphere via billboards and public advertisements.

“It’s very interesting, because it’s in the heart of Catholicism,” she said.

Ironically, by forming their own churches Africans are carrying out a kind of “reverse” missionary activity in Western countries, she said—in part because they see Western Christianity as lax.

“The pastors tell me, ‘We want to reach the world, and I know God has brought us here because the West has lost its way,’” Casteline said. “‘Yes, the West brought us Christianity, but now we’re bringing it back to them.’”

It turns out that when he counseled his disciples, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,” Jesus was tapping into a concept that neuroscientists say could reduce stress for our hyperanxious society.

At Fordham, Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, is taking his lead from these neuroscientists and arguing that those who find solace in the sermon would also benefit from what science has to say. In his latest book, The Power of Neuroplasticity for Pastoral and Spiritual Care (Lexington Books, 2014), Bingaman suggests ways pastoral and spiritual caregivers can draw on contemporary neuroscience to help their clients and congregants relieve undue anxiety.

“We hear it in the Sermon on the Mount and we hear it in our churches today—don’t worry about tomorrow, stay centered in today. We grasp it intellectually, but how, practically, do we not worry?” said Bingaman, who is also a pastoral counselor.

Neuroplasticity and the Negativity Bias

In the book, Bingaman explores the impact that an adaptive mechanism known as the negativity bias has on our well-being. An evolutionary cousin of the “fight or flight” phenomenon, this bias describes the brain’s propensity to experience negative events more intensely in order to alert us to potential danger.

A built-in negativity bias was vital when humans lived as hunter-gatherers ever at the ready to flee from a hungry lion. In the modern world, however, this bias tends to cause excessive negativity and anxiety.

“[This] anxiety spills over into our relationships with others and with ourselves,” Bingaman said. “It causes us to assume the worst, to overreact to situations in ways such as, ‘Why did you look at me this way? Why did you use that tone?’”

Fortunately, he says, we are not condemned to primal negativity, thanks to the human brain’s capacity to change across the lifespan. With every new experience—creating a memory, learning new information, or adapting to a new situation—the brain undergoes structural changes, generating new neural pathways and reshaping existing ones. This ability, known as neuroplasticity, forms the crux of Bingaman’s book.

He argues that the most effective way to harness the power of neuroplasticity is through mindfulness meditation and contemplative spiritual practice. Through these therapeutic and spiritual techniques, clients learn to become aware of their thoughts and feelings. Rather than reacting to or trying to eliminate them, clients learn to simply observe them as they come and go, without getting “hooked.”

“Thoughts and feelings have a 90-second shelf-life biochemically. So when we experience an anxious thought or feeling, [the reaction]will dissipate from the blood in 90 seconds—unless we feed the thought or judge ourselves for feeling that way,” he said. “The key to mindfulness-based therapy is to let thoughts and feelings come and go without fighting them. This then reduces the limbic activity in our brains and calms the amygdala.”

These practices—which are so well-regarded that they are central to the “third wave” of classical cognitive behavioral therapy—can take a variety of forms and be applied in both religious and nonreligious settings. For example, one might spend 15 minutes each day sitting quietly and focusing on the ebb and flow of his or her breath. Alternatively, one might practice something like the Christian centering prayer, in which the practitioner meditates on a “sacred word” (such as “Jesus,” “God,” or “love”) while learning to modulate the many other chaotic thoughts that crowd the mind.

A New Approach to Pastoral Counseling

Bingaman says that these practices, informed by the science of neuroplasticity, will “necessitate a paradigm shift” in the way pastoral and spiritual caregivers approach their work with clients, especially clients whose anxiety may have been exacerbated by their own religious beliefs.

“When a theology views the spiritual quest as a matter of warfare—as a battle within the person, or as a matter of good versus evil and flesh versus spirit—that activates neural circuitry that causes stress,” he said. “If we overdo that construct, the person in our care might see himself as flawed and defective, and that could end up reinforcing the negativity bias.

“Whether it’s therapy or theology, we need to look at the frames of reference we are using to help the person in our care to calm their anxious brain. Some of our approaches are going to fire up the limbic region, and others will do the reverse,” he said. “So we have to make more use of contemplative practices in religious and spiritual circles… They’re not just for the mystics off in the desert. They’re for you and me and everyone else.”

“In a way, you become a New Yorker when you become accustomed to the sound of the subway running by,” said sound scholar Andrew Albin, Ph.D. “Those two very different relationships to that sound, [being startled versus not hearing the train at all], are tied to two different identities.”

Albin, an assistant professor of English, works in an emerging field in the humanities known as sound studies. The field explores how we experience sound and what meanings sound holds for us as individuals, within our communities, and in our social and historical contexts.

“Sound scholars are interested in the full range of sound experiences—speech, soundscapes, music, environmental sounds, animal sounds, imagined sounds, and so on,” said Albin, who also specializes in medieval literature. “[How do] social, cultural, material, environmental, and historical [factors]influence the way listeners actually hear those sounds?”

Some questions that a sound scholar might tackle include: Did medieval audiences listen to music with “different ears” than modern audiences, who listen to reconstructions of medieval music on iPods? Does our experience of sanctity change based on whether we worship in a hushed and hallowed Catholic cathedral versus among the jubilations of an evangelical church? How does growing accustomed to the screech of the subway become a sign that you’ve become a New Yorker?

“The silence of the countryside or the hubbub of the city… can inform the ways you conceive of yourself, the way you understand your community, the values you hold, and even the texts you read and music you listen to and how you listen to it,” Albin said.

“Sound scholars are finding ways to talk about that. They ask, ‘What are the meanings that are attached to these sound experiences? Why do they take the shapes that they do? What patterns are emerging and what does that tell us about the culture in which we live?’”

The Sound of Angels Singing

Albin’s current research focuses on the works of 14th-century English mystic Richard Rolle, who was famed for his alleged ability to hear the sound of angels singing. His auditory experience of the divine sets him apart from other medieval mystics, whose mystical experiences of God were primarily visual, or even avoided the five senses entirely. This peculiarity, however, made Rolle a controversial figure.

“His critics were very skeptical of him,” Albin said. “Their response was to complain there’s no way to say for sure whether or not he is hearing angels singing. More likely than not, they said, he’s probably just enjoying a rich diet, drinking lots of wine, and hallucinating.”

Nevertheless, Rolle became one of the most widely read authors in medieval England. He went on to pen a mystical treatise, the Melos amoris, of which Albin is doing the first English translation. In it, Rolle writes a sort of “musical” text, full of alliterative and rhythmic prose, to gesture toward the beauty of angelic song and illustrate how the devout soul can become like a “musical harmony, a perfect fourth,” Albin said.

Rolle’s mysticism spread throughout northern England, launching angel song to what might have been No. 1, had there been medieval music charts. However, this ability to hear angelic song was not bestowed upon just any believer, Rolle stipulated. The ability meant you were one of God’s “predestined elect” and thus guaranteed a place in heaven. With their promise of spiritual supremacy on earth and a reserved seat in paradise, Rolle’s claims began making waves in the socio-religious hierarchy.

“You can claim to hear it and nobody can prove it one way or another. And to claim you hear angels’ song potentially means that you acquire a kind of social cache, a spiritual authority that allows you to move around in social categories that you didn’t have access to and to speak in arenas you otherwise couldn’t speak in—especially if you’re a lay person,” Albin said.

“It becomes this widespread phenomenon where people are hearing angels left and right. So the mystics of the following generation write documents explaining to people that they may think they are hearing angelic song, but they’re actually not—they’re thinking too hard or wanting it too much and hence deluding themselves into thinking it’s happening.”

Bringing Rolle’s Mysticism to Life

In addition to translating the Melos amoris, Albin is collaborating with Sine Nomine, a musical group in residence at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, to bring Rolle’s mysticism to life.

“One manuscript of the Melos amoris has two items in it—one is the treatise in Latin and the other is a gathering of music notation. And no one has noticed that these two are next to one another,” Albin said.

The group will perform a concert in December of 2015 featuring Rolle’s music and a recording of the performance will be packaged with Albin’s translation, which is due out in 2017.

“When a medieval text that’s all about angels singing is put next to a collection of medieval music, you have to think there’s something interesting going on there,” he said.

Molly Ness, Ph.D., associate professor of education in the Graduate School of Education’s Division of Curriculum and Teaching, wants teachers to embrace the innate curiosity of children that might lead them to ask queries such as “When you lose weight, where does it go?”

“Having kids generate questions themselves is one of the most effective strategies not just in reading comprehension, but in general content knowledge and retention.  Recent research indicates that brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.” she said.

“But if you look at the research, questioning is really not happening in classrooms.”

There’s a certain irony in that the average four-year-old girl will ask 390 questions a day, but when they enter formal schooling, the situation is flipped. Teachers will ask on average 400 questions a day, and often view off-topic questions as distractions that they don’t have time to address. Or worse, they view it as a challenge to the power dynamic in the classroom.

“Teachers are not all that proficient at leading classroom discussions, and there’s a fair amount of research that says that letting kids initiate discussions is somewhat of a shift for them,” Ness said.

Enter the Parking Lot. While visiting the classroom of a former student of hers who is now a third-grade teacher, Ness found that he’d been letting students write their off-topics or difficult questions on a piece of paper, which was then “parked” on a poster on the classroom door. Although he’d planned to answer them in a timely manner, he conceded that questions would sometimes go for weeks without answers.

Ness set out to help him use the questions, and detailed the experience in “Moving Student’s Questions Out of The Parking Lot,” an article she published in The Reading Teacher last year. That in turn lead to “The Question is the Answer: Supporting Student-Generated Queries in Elementary Classroom,” which Ness wrote over the summer on a Fordham Fellowship, and which will be published in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield.

“The book will showcase how naturally curious and inquisitive young children are,,the academic and motivational benefits of question generation, and practical solutions and teaching strategies to help kids to come to the answers themselves. The goal is to help teachers and parents implement engaging ways to not promote questioning but to also help kids discover the answers to their own questions,” she said.

Inquiry-based instruction is not new, but it has taken on added importance in classrooms today thanks to the Common Core State Standards, which places a greater emphasis on both question generation and addressing these questions with informational or expository text. Ness’ research focuses broadly on reading comprehension, as well as the instructional beliefs and decisions of K-5 teachers.

“Kids 10 years ago were spending the majority of their time entrenched in narrative text, and now they’re are spending about 50 percent of their time in narrative and 50 percent in expository text,” she said. “That means a whole different way of approaching texts.”

Informational text conveys information about the natural or social world. Children struggle with it the most because it often features an overwhelming amount of information with no  real text structure, technical vocabulary, and timeless verb tenses.. But it’s crucial to master, said Ness, because as we transition into adulthood we read more informational text and less narrative text.

“If I were to ask you – as a proficient adult reader –  to make a list of 15 things you read today, the majority of them would probably be informational: directions on a subway map, an article that you read in USA Today, an e-mail, or a recipe—those sorts of things,” Ness explained.

She has found the Parking Lot concept so useful that she uses it with her own four-year-old daughter when she wants to know (at 7:30 a.m.) why the sun seems to follow her through the day. Ness will jot the question down on sticky notes. When it’s time to go to the library, she retrieves the notes, and they decide which questions to address using informational text.

Throughout the process of writing the book, Ness has been amazed at the number of “thick” questions that friends and colleagues have shared. Thick questions are the big, juicy ones that lead to debate, discourse, reflection, and conversation.

“A child was asking about the water cycle, and they had learned that the percentage of salt in our bodies is the same percentage of salt in the oceans,” she said. “The child said, ‘If the salt in my tears is the same amount of salt in the ocean, why when I go swimming, does it hurt when I open my eyes underwater, but it doesn’t hurt when I cry?” she said.

“The teacher and I were like, ‘I have no idea, but that’s a brilliant question.”