In the news
“English comes more easily now to Jacob Quijada, a 20-year-old
landscaper from El Salvador. ‘I understand a lot of English,’
Quijada said, as he sat with other students at the Aetna Center for
Families this week. He credits his three years of twice-weekly
English as a Second Language classes at the center for his progress.
Now, though, the center is to close. The center has run out of
money, and will probably shut its doors at the end of the year,
though a community effort is in the works to salvage the program's
services. ‘We're going to try to figure out how to keep the services
- maybe not the Center for Families, but there will be some kind of
services,’ said Mayor Eddie A. Perez. … The center, established in
the late 1990s, was a program of the Southside Institutions
Neighborhood Alliance, and was operated by alliance member
Connecticut Children's Medical Center. Its other two major partners
are Trinity College and Hartford Hospital. ‘It's sad for all of us,"
said Luis Caban, director of the alliance. ‘You couldn't find a
better fit in terms of programs for this community ... It's going to
leave a huge, huge vacuum in this community.’ The alliance recently
announced that it could not find the grant funding to keep the
center open, officials said. ‘These things aren't done arbitrarily
or capriciously,’ said Kevin Kinsella, president of the board of
Southside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance and vice president of
government affairs at Hartford Hospital. ‘We've tried every which
way we can to get it funded adequately.’”
“Valued Neighborhood Resource Threatened”
Hartford Courant, December 15 2005
“At the end of his
presentation last week in a panel titled ‘Christian America?’ Rev.
Richard Cizik, an Evangelical lobbyist in Washington, was confronted
with an unexpected question: Does he believe Jews go to heaven?
Caught off guard, Cizik, who is vice president for governmental
affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, said his
practice was to ‘do my best to avoid answering that question because
it leads us to a place where we don’t necessarily need to go.’ The
question — prompted by the 2002 declaration of James Sibley, head of
the Southern Baptists’ Mission to the Jews, implying that Jews can
only reach heaven through Jesus — may have seemed awkward and the
answer evasive, but both were in the spirit of the two-day
conference on Jews and Evangelicals that took place last week at the
Jewish Theological Seminary. Participants said it was important to
outline issues on which they could not agree in an effort to define
the boundaries of their relationship. Barry Kosmin of Trinity
College in Hartford, Conn., found in his survey that 97 percent of
Evangelicals agreed with the statement ‘God helps me,’ as opposed to
just 34 percent of Jews and 71 percent of adults in general.
Economically, the two groups were not found to be dissimilar; 73
percent of Jews and 75 percent of Evangelicals said they owned their
own homes and 58 percent of Jews and 49 percent of Evangelicals were
college graduates. A majority of Jews, 56 percent, said they were
Democrats while a majority of Evangelicals, 58 percent, identified
as Republicans. ‘Clearly, Jews are literally and figuratively
blue-state Americans while Evangelicals are red-state,’ said Kosmin.
‘The source of the gap lies in political and social reasons more
than economics.’
“Finding Uncommon Ground: Jews and
Evangelicals explore
the
boundaries of their relationship at JTS conference”
The Jewish Week,
December 9, 2005
“Acclaimed American soprano Christine Brewer will
add some visibility and splendor to Trinity College's Lessons and
Carols this Sunday. Brewer is guest soloist in the college's annual
holiday service, which includes Christmas favorites and original
musical settings, sung with the combined forces of the Trinity
College Concert Choir and the Trinity College Chapel Singers. Her
professional career began with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and
Brewer has sung regularly at the Metropolitan Opera and with many of
the world's leading orchestras. Her extensive repertoire ranges from
Mozart to Britten. This year she released a new, highly praised CD
of great operatic arias, sung in English.”
Trinity hosts guest
soloist
Hartford Courant,
December 8, 2005
“A group of Connecticut academics is urging the state's top
election official to scrap the bidding for new electronic voting
machines, saying she favors models that could be prone to glitches.
The group wants Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz to consider a
different device because mistake-prone machines could discourage
people from voting. ‘You don't have to assume chicanery,’ said Ralph
Morelli, who teaches at Trinity College in Hartford. ‘If the machine
can't be booted up in the morning, nobody gets to vote. If they
miscalculate how many voters can be handled on a machine, you're
going to have huge lines and people are going to be turned away. Why
go through this?’ Morelli and his group, TrueVoteConnecticut, have
launched a Web site and a letter-writing campaign that they hope
will generate support to restart the bidding process. But Bysiewicz
questions their impartiality and said the device they favor doesn't
meet state law. … Under the new state law, machines must have paper
trails so voters can check somewhere on the machines that their
votes were cast properly. … Bysiewicz, who disagrees with
TrueVoteConnecticut's conclusions, said her office is also looking
at adding more optical scan devices to polling places, which
Morelli's organization favors because they create a paper trail.”
“Group of professors in battle with
state over voting machine”
Newsday,
December 7, 2005
“In honor of Human Rights Week and Human Rights Day, Hartford Magnet
Middle School and Trinity College students will adopt the roles of
United Nations delegates and legal advisers today to thrash out a
protocol on protecting children during wartime. Styled after a
United Nations General Assembly meeting, the session will focus on
how to prohibit the detention, mistreatment and torture of children
in wartime. The middle school students will represent various
countries and Trinity students from the "Human Rights and the War on
Terror" First-Year Seminar will counsel the seventh-graders on the
implications of their decisions. Trinity senior Bao Ngoc Lien Pham
of West Hartford, the student mentor for the seminar, will serve as
United Nations inspector general for the assembly.”
“Students To Play U.N. Roles To Mark Human Rights Week”
Hartford
Courant,
December 6, 2005
“They're finally out of Hell, but
expect to spend another five years in Purgatory. A small price to
pay to make it to the concluding canto of Paradise, most likely in
the year 2016, say members of Lectura Dantis at Boston College.
Several dozen enthusiasts of the 14th-century Italian poet Dante
Alighieri's masterwork, ‘The Divine Comedy,’ have been meeting
monthly since February 2000 to read and discuss the epic narrative
poem about a journey through the nine circles of Hell (Inferno), the
seven deadly sins of Purgatory (Purgatorio), and nine spheres of
Heaven (Paradiso) to reach God. … Between 50-75 students and
community members, including several priest and nuns, typically
attend the monthly meetings at BC, which usually feature a guest
speaker who reads a canto in Italian and leads a discussion in
English. A guest lecture in 2002 by 1997 US Poet Laureate Robert
Pinsky of Newton filled a 400-person lecture hall, said Lectura
Dantis cofounder Laurie Shepard, a Boston College professor of
Italian. She invited Newton North High School teacher Emilio Mazzola
to help organize the group after seeing the popularity of a
smaller-scale reading at Trinity College in Hartford.”
“Dante
devotees are five years from Heaven”
Boston Globe, December 4, 2005
“[Pfeil] didn't just teach the craft of writing - he was a
prolific writer himself, turning out novellas, novels, short
stories, poems, reviews, a libretto, scholarly articles and
literary, cultural and political criticism, according to a biography
prepared by Trinity College. His work was respected and, among
numerous other awards, in 1994 he won the prestigious Pushcart Prize
for a novella and short story collection. When something caught
Pfeil's attention, he explored it with zeal. He was one of the
organizers of the Trinity Anti-War Coalition, and his friend and
colleague, Professor Paul Lauter, said that he once came upon Pfeil
and students performing street theater outside Mather Hall that
illustrated the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Part of Pfeil's charm was the way he connected with his students on
a personal level and the way he helped them connect with each other.
Lauter remembers sitting in on one of Pfeil's classes years ago. At
the beginning of class, Pfeil asked each of his students to say
their names and something about themselves that was distinctive. At
the end of class, he repeated each of the students' names and the
unique fact about them, showing each student that their stories had
made an impression on him”
“Fred
Pfeil, Trinity English Professor, Dies At 56 ”
Hartford Courant,
December 2 2005
“Trinity College and the
Trinity Club of Hartford recently honored Timothy Curtis, Class of
1986, and Gerald J. Hansen, Jr., Class of 1951, at the club's annual
banquet. Curtis, a resident of Farmington, received the 2005 Person
of the Year Award. A 15-year teacher and coach in the Avon school
system, he received media attention last year when he suspended two
players from his basketball team for drinking during a school event.
When the school administration did not support his decision, he
resigned his coaching position. Many parents and students rallied to
support him. Eventually, the boys served a three-game suspension, he
returned to coaching and the team won a state championship. Hansen,
of Simsbury, received a Lifetime Achievement Award for five decades
of service to Trinity. He has served on the board of fellows at the
college in Hartford, as its director of alumni and college relations
for 20 years and as secretary of the college. A squash court and
Hansen Hall are named for Hansen, who holds the title secretary of
the college emeritus. “
“Education Briefs”
Hartford Courant,
November 29, 2005
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