When a topic or question in their discipline sparks the imagination of students, they often go on to complete a major honors project. These yearlong efforts go beyond any major’s senior capstone requirements. This year, four students completed major honors: Kayla Petersen (social science), Beth Scalise (psychology), Alexa Spandrio (biology) and Char Combrink (religious studies).
Our Bodies and the Church Body: How should churches allocate resources for discussing
abortion, promoting human flourishing, and meeting the needs of our community?
Kayla Petersen
Both inside the Church and beyond, we often struggle to communicate with one another
about the issues that matter most to us, instead falling into polarizing language.
Deliberative forums provide a platform for expressing what we truly value when talking
about complex topics such as abortion, helping us to arrive at common ground and make
decisions that benefit all of us. I wanted to create an issue guide for deliberation
with churches in Santa Barbara that would foster thoughtful conversations and action
about abortion and related topics. To develop the issue guide, I spent the year researching
policy and faith perspectives on abortion pre- and post- Roe v. Wade, interviewed
and surveyed pastors, church attendees, and Westmont community members, and drafted
the guide for an online deliberation.
The Impact of Narrative Versus Statistical Persuasion on Attitudes, Intentions, and
Behaviors Regarding Dessert Consumption in Undergraduate Students
Beth Scalise
This study examines the effects of two methods of persuasion. Statistical persuasion
involves the presentation of facts and numbers, whereas narrative persuasion utilizes
a story or personal testimony. Narrative persuasion is more effective in several
health contexts. In this study, the effects of a narrative or statistical video were
evaluated for a number of measures including attitudes about and intentions to eat
desserts and dessert consumption behavior.
Newly identified in vivo expressed Bordetella virulence genes
Alexa Spandrio
Bordetella is a bacterial pathogen responsible for the respiratory disease whooping
cough. The goal of this study was to identify bacterial virulence genes that are
expressed only during respiratory infection. A genetic system was developed and used
to identify several novel Bordetella genes that are expressed while the bacteria are
inside the respiratory tract but not on laboratory media. These data could have implications
for improving the current whooping cough vaccine.
Evolution-Compatible Fall Narratives: A Heuristic Taxonomy
Char Combrink
This paper explores the tensions between a widely accepted evolutionary understanding
of human origins and a traditional Christian fall narrative, identifies a selection
of scholarly responses to this tension, and organizes these responses in a taxonomy
of possible approaches to reconciling evolutionary theory with overarching Christian
commitments. It also addresses the difficulties each approach appears to present for
remaining faithful to these Christian commitments, and utilizes the taxonomy developed
to explore relationships between protology and eschatology.