[caption id="attachment_19821" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Spectators at Iowa football game, The University of Iowa, 1950s. Courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries' University Archives.[/caption] In 2015, Time Magazine ran a piece exploring why student athletes struggled...

https://flic.kr/p/ZCZVUn A Journey into the Unknown by Bastian Schmidt. Used through a Creative Commons License How do we know what we know? When does an introduced idea cross that threshold from something encountered to something...

[caption id="attachment_19557" align="alignright" width="213"] Ramayan (1987 TV series) poster[/caption] In 1987, the Hindu epic The Rāmāyaṇa was serialized for Indian television. It immediately became immensely popular and was treated with ritualistic honor throughout the country when...

Our family had a sacred ritual we practiced every Friday night while I was growing up. We traveled to a video store called Movies and Sounds and paid homage to the higher forces that fired...

Growing up in East Texas, I was afraid of exactly two things—funerals and poison ivy. I occasionally had nightmares about having to attend the local rituals of the dearly departed. To be fair, many of...

An immense billboard looms over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. On it, a woman appears to be consumed with deep sorrow, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. A crown of flowers rests ironically upon her...

The classic characters and narratives of Greek mythology sculpted in stone throughout antiquity display a wide range of human emotions and psychological motifs. One particular expression, however, is often curiously absent – laughter. While laughing...