Scott Anderson (art) illustrated a cover story for the Sunday, February 16, business section of The New York Times, “The Gospel of Peter: Why Christianity is on the upswing in Silicon Valley,” and also exhibited a painting in the group show “The Storytellers” at Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara.
Holly Beers (religious studies) published “Colossians and Philemon,” a volume in the series “Word and Spirit Commentary on the New Testament” (Baker Academic), which she also co-edits. She presented papers at the recent annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Society for Pentecostal Studies.
John Blondell (theater arts) serves as artistic director for the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival in Verona, Italy. He directed “Four Days of Closeness” for Divadlo Laska in Prague, and produced the Lit World Theater Festival in Santa Barbara, for which he directed “King Lear” and “Uncle Vanya.”
Katherine Bryant (political science) and colleagues received a $5,000 Council of Christian Colleges and Universities Planning Grant for “Christian-Informed International Relations: Thinking, Teaching, and Practicing,” which included a conference of scholars exploring how to approach and teach international relations from a biblical perspective. She and student Kate Robinson won the Hatfield Prize from the Center for Public Justice. (see page 43).
Ben Carlson (physics) published a paper, “Nanosecond hardware regression trees in FPGA at the LHC” in the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A.
Michael Everest (chemistry), student co-author Junia Coe-Renner ’26 and collaborators at Baylor University published an article in the Journal of Molecular Structure, “Bond lengths and band strengths of non-equivalent C-H bonds of 2-methyl-1,3-butadiene using density functional theory, Fourier transform IR, and cavity ringdown techniques.”
Doug Fontes (physics and engineering) and colleagues published a paper, “Computational fluid dynamics challenge on indoor dispersion of pathogen-laden aerosols,” in the Physics of Fluids Journal.
Elizabeth Gardner (communication studies) co-presented a paper, “Lewis Hine in Ongoing Debates over Child Labor: Visual Enthymeme in Public Memory,” at the annual National Communication Conference in November.
Daniel Gee (music), performed as a guest singer with the USC Thornton Chamber Singers as part of Noon to Midnight, hosted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He served as guest conductor of the Santa Barbara Chamber Players at the 2024 Winter Showcase of the Grace Fisher Foundation at the Granada Theatre. His commissioned work, “Agua Quemada” (“Burned Water”), premiered at the Westmont museum’s outdoor installation event “Ember Trees.” The Lilly Network of Church- Related Colleges and Universities commissioned him to write music for the vespers service of their National Conference at Westmont. At the Westmont Fall Choral Festival, 10 choirs and more than 300 singers performed his composition “Cuán Bueno,” published with Walton Music.
Russell Howell (mathematics) and student researchers published “Flip a Coin, Get an Annular Function?” in The American Mathematical Monthly. He’ll serve as distinguished visiting professor for a year at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He presented the annual “Pi Day” colloquium at the academy and research about complex analysis at Kathmandu University, Nepal.
Jonathan Hicks (theater arts) won a professional development grant to advance his negotiation knowledge and skills for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 442.
The American Society of Engineering Education annual conference accepted a paper by Daniel Jensen (engineering), a co-author and several students, “Artificial Intelligence and Engineering Design: How AI Impacts a Suite of Design Innovation Methods.”
Blake Victor Kent (sociology and anthropology) co-authored numerous publications, including “Forgiveness and health across racial-ethnic cohorts: Exploring the conditioning roles of religious attendance and closeness to God in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health” and “Belief in Miracles, Religious/Spiritual Struggles, and Depressive Symptoms: Exploring Variation among American Indian, South Asian, and White Cohorts in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health” in Mental Health, Religion, & Culture; “Childhood Predictors of Belief in Life After Death: A Cross-National Analysis with 22 Countries,” in Scientific Reports; “Demographic Variations of Self-Rated Physical Health Across 22 Countries: Findings from the Global Flourishing Study” in BMC Global and Public Health; and “The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing” in Nature Mental Health.
An article in the San Jose Spotlight quoted Tom Knecht (political science), “Focused on the goal: Santa Clara won’t spend any taxpayer money on World Cup upgrades.” He was also featured in a U.S. Today article, “Will Eagles visit the Trump White House if invited? It’s complicated.” Find his research about the different ways U.S. presidents talk about sports while in office on his blog: 22zin.com.
Pie Martinez (Westmont in San Francisco) published five articles about Bay Area art exhibitions with San Francisco’s El Tecolote newspaper.
Steve Porter (Martin Institute) received a $40,000 grant from Calvin University’s Nagel Institute to collect a multi-authored history of the Protestant Spiritual Formation Movement and commission key contemporary leaders to envision the needs for the movement’s future. He co-organized and presented at the Spiritual Formation Summit at Fuller Theological Seminary; offered “The Sanctification Gap Revisited,” at the Evangelical Theological Society conference; and presented “Spirituality and Mission” at the Dallas Willard School of Kingdom Living.
Helen Rhee (religious studies) published: “Helen Rhee on Early Christianity’s Views on Wealth and Poverty,” on the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship website; a review of Jennifer A. Quigley, “Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity” in “Studies in Late Antiquity”; and “Pain in Ancient Medicine and Literature, and Early Christianity: The Paradox of Inshareability and Agency,” in “Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities.” She gave a keynote address, “Providence, Socio-economic Inequality, and Eschatology,” at the Challenge of Poverty Conference in Finland; presented a paper, “Socio-economic Inequality, Human Flourishing, and Eschatology in Asterius of Amasea and Theodoret of Cyrus,” at the XVIII International Conference on Patristic Studies; and offered “Comments on Bruce Hindmarsh’s Diagnosing Christian Immaturity: A Historical Perspective,” at the Martin Institute Workshop on Christian Immaturity at Westmont.
Sandy Richter (religious studies) contributed an essay, “Environmental Approaches,” in Hardy and Carroll’s collected volume, “The State of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent Research,” and an essay on “The Socio-Economic World of Deuteronomy” in the recently released Oxford Handbook of Deuteronomy. Her essay on “The Name Theology in 2 Samuel 7 and 1 Kings 8: A Case of Divine Presence or a New Kind of King?” will appear later this year in the collected volume, “God of the Fathers: Conceptualizations of Divinity in Genesis and Deuteronomy.” She served as theologian in residence at Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center in North Carolina addressing the book of Psalms in August 2024; offered the T.W. Lewis Lectures on Jesus and A Just Society at Millsaps College and Galloway United Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, addressing environmental stewardship in October 2024; and served as the plenary speaker for the annual Didasko Seminar in Eugene, Oregon, training pastors in Bible and hermeneutics in November 2024.
Meagan Stirling (art) exhibited her artwork in the “Impressions in Ink” exhibition at Sebastopol Center for the Arts and in the prestigious 39th Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition this spring.
Alastair Su (history) won the 2025 Graves Award in the Humanities, which will support his forthcoming book, “Flowering Gold: American Capital and the Opium War.” He presented a conference paper, “The Bailout of 1848: John Murray Forbes, the China Trade, and the Michigan Central” at the Business History Conference in Atlanta.
The WiSDM 2023 Springer Proceedings, “Advances in Data Science,” published a paper by Maryke van der Walt (mathematics and computer science), “Supervised Dimension Reduction via Local Gradient Elongation.” Jointly authored with seven other researchers, the paper resulted from work done at the collaborative “Women in Data Science and Mathematics” workshop at UCLA in August 2023.
An article for the China Christian Daily featured Telford Work (religious studies) and his trip with Outreach Foundation, which visited Hong Kong, Shanghai and cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.
Franciscan Ministries appointed Diane Ziliotto (library) to serve a three-year term on the board of directors for the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library. The organization collects and preserves historical and cultural materials relating to the Franciscans, the missions and their communities, and seeks to make these materials available to researchers and the community.
This is a story from the Spring 2025 Westmont Magazine