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Why Your ‘True Self’ Is An Illusion

In the first season of The X-Files, Dana Scully accompanies her former FBI Academy teacher, Jack Willis, to an attempted bank robbery. One of the robbers shoots Willis and Scully shoots the robber, who dies. After a near-death experience in the hospital, Willis wakes up, but he has changed. He’s dark, evil. His body has been possessed by the bank robber, who will try to reunite with his lover and seek revenge on whoever tipped off the FBI.

Matt Stichter.
Stichter

If we believe that deep down, we’re morally good, does it push us to act accordingly? In a paper published in this month, Matt Stichter, a moral philosopher at Washington State University, brought up some potential ethical downsides of people walking around with the belief that they have a morally good true self.

“Initially my reaction was, ‘Oh wow, this is great. People inherently care about morality as core to their identity,’” Stitcher said ”But the more I started to think about it, the more it started to worry me.”

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Vice

The Convent of Wesel

The Event that Never Was and the Invention of Tradition

Jesse Spohnholz.
Spohnholz

Host Jana Byars talks with Jesse Spohnholz, professor of history and director of The Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program at Washington State University in beautiful Pullman, Washington, to talk about his penultimate book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition first published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press and out 2020 in paperback.

The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped establish foundations for Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic and northwest Germany. However, Jesse Spohnholz shows that that event did not happen, but was an idea created and perpetuated by historians and record keepers since the 1600s. Appropriately, this book offers not just a fascinating snapshot of Reformation history but a reflection on the nature of historical inquiry itself. The Convent of Wesel begins with a detailed microhistory that unravels the mystery and then traces knowledge about the document at the centre of the mystery over four and a half centuries, through historical writing, archiving and centenary commemorations. Spohnholz reveals how historians can inadvertently align themselves with protagonists in the debates they study and thus replicate errors that conceal the dynamic complexity of the past.

The conversation covers the book, of course, with a good discussion about how history is done.

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New Books Network

Debate erupts over road across Mount St. Helens blast zone

Conservation groups and scientists are challenging a federal decision to build a road through the Mount St. Helens blast zone, saying it would damage more than two dozen decades worth of irreplaceable research plots.

John Bishop.
Bishop

John Bishop, professor of biology at Washington State University, says the plan would be extremely damaging for researchers — but also for ordinary people who want to better understand the 1980 eruption’s aftermath. The road construction and tunnel work would require the temporary closure of the Truman Trail, a hiking route across the Pumice Plain.

“Right now, when you go hiking out in the Pumice Plain as well as many other areas in the monument, you’re experiencing being in a wilderness,” he said. “You really feel that when you’re out there, you’re in a really unique place.”

The Forest Service determined the plan strikes the right balance between public safety and scientific pursuits. It plans to begin work this spring.

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The Daily News
Oregon Live
US News & World Report

Criminologist Faith Lutze internationally honored for her work

Faith Lutze.
Lutze

The international Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) has selected Faith Lutze, a Washington State University professor and expert in criminal justice, to receive the group’s prestigious Founder’s Award in recognition of “a career of providing substantial contributions to the Academy and to the discipline of criminal justice through education and research.”

“It is such an honor to be recognized as an ACJS Founder and to represent such a respected community of justice scholars and educators, Lutze said. “I am proud, grateful and inspired to continue the important work of the Academy.”

Lutze coordinated and helped grow her department’s undergraduate and graduate programs and has mentored numerous doctoral students and junior faculty over the years. She has also developed a number of community engagement activities and served on criminal justice policy boards at the state and federal levels.

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WSU Insider

Fine arts professor wins two national awards

Hallie G. Meredith.
Meredith

Hallie G. Meredith, a teaching assistant professor of fine arts at Washington State University, is being honored with two major awards for her research into ancient Roman art processes.

Meredith received the William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art before 1750 from SECAC, a leading national arts education and research organization, for her project “Fragmentary and Unfinished Art: Documenting Undocumented Late Roman Art and Process.” She was also selected to receive a 2021 Clark Fellowship for her related project, “Workshops, Process, and Anonymity: The Roots of Contemporary Craft in Ancient Roman Art.”

“The Roman practice of concealing evidence of carving has led to a fundamental gap in our knowledge concerning production,” Meredith said. “My approach will enable unfinished pieces to take center stage, with the potential for fundamentally important – but obscured – visual information to be accessed, and their wider significance and cross-disciplinary implications to be addressed.”

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WSU Insider