U
sually in the middle of a semester at the College I’m busy with lectures, grading, or solving problems ranging from a missed class to an imploded POE. Instead, this past October I was flying into Jerusalem ready to research religious conflict. I was going to the Holy Land to find out if we can predict the behavior of religious people when they are confronted with images of competing and conflicting religious groups. Armed with our wits, cameras and a few pieces of scientific equipment, I arrived with Caleb Gwinn ’11, a biology POE from Tyrone, and Kristoffer Nielbo, a doctoral student from the University of Aarhus in Denmark. We checked into a fleabag hotel in the Old City. We didn’t know it was a fleabag hotel, of course. (See Caleb’s story below for a more descriptive review of their accommodations.)
I
t started with an email which would shape the next six months of my life, and perhaps beyond.
the State College airport. Upon takeoff I did my best to act like I had been in the sky before, I gazed out the window, watching central Pennsylvania shrink below me. After some travel snafus, we board the airliner for a long, long flight to Israel. I tried using my laptop, but was less than amused without the Internet. I tried sleeping, but never could sleep sitting up. I tried ignoring the feelings of elevating and dipping through the air, but occasionally found myself white-knuckled. On our final decent into Tel Aviv, I got my first look of any land outside of North America. Fast-forward time again. Past finding 61
2011 Spring-Summer
Professor Don Braxton proposed an offer, as they say, I couldn’t refuse. The bottom line of the message was this: he needed a research assistant for a study in the Old City of Jerusalem and I fit the bill. I had never been farther east than New York City but I jumped at the chance to visit the Middle East. Though I’d taken a handful of religious studies classes, I was not pursuing a major in the field. Yet my background in biology was a perfect fit.
Braxton’s work centers around two revolutionary concepts in the field of Religious Study: true scientific investigation (falsifiable theories, objective evidence, and scientific method) and the use of biometric devices. After familiarizing myself with the equipment we would use, as well as the terrain of the Middle East, I was eager to start the work. Hit fast forward. Past a nerveshattering presentation in front of 50 elite scholars, past getting my passport, and past countless hours Googling everything about Jerusalem. Time for my first flight— on a puddle-jumping airplane at