With Good Reason

Over the past decade, Mexican drug traffickers trying to get their products to the U.S. have had a spiritual “protector.” Her name is Santa Muerte, and she’s a Mexican folk saint for not just drug traffickers, but prostitutes too. R. Andrew Chesnut (Virginia Commonwealth University) is the author of a new book about Santa Muerte, [...]

Studies show that women in academia are often relegated to lower-ranked positions while their male counterparts ascend to the top. Khadijah Miller (Norfolk State University) says finding a balance between work and home life can be stressful. So she helped form the Sistah Colleague Circle to give women encouragement, support, and a collaborative work environment. [...]

National interest in the spiritual practices and beliefs of our presidents is as strong as ever.  In his new book, The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents, David Holmes (College of William and Mary) looks at the role of religion in the lives of the twelve presidents who have served since the end of World War [...]

Have you ever wanted to create your own television series? Kathryn O’Sullivan (Northern Virginia Community College) and her husband Paul Awad did just that—only they aired their Western soap online. The award-nominated series is called Thurston, and it’s one of many new independent productions in the emerging genre of web television. And: We’ll speak with [...]

Appalachia is often imagined as rural and white, but a new wave of African-American writers is challenging the notion of a single Appalachian region and culture. They call themselves Affrilachians. Joanne Gabbin is the director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. She brought Affrilachian poets from across the country to her [...]

The Victorians photographed their dead before burial.  Abraham Lincoln’s death might have popularized embalming.  Some people today have their ashes made into diamonds. Bernard Means (Virginia Commonwealth University) studies how and why we bury our dead – and how that’s changed over the last few centuries. Plus: A trip to some orphan graveyards – forgotten places [...]

When Jack Beck and Wendy Welch (University of Virginia at Wise) decided to move to the small mountain town of Big Stone Gap, they hadn’t planned on opening a used bookstore. But a big Victorian house captured their imaginations and before they knew it they were setting up shop. Despite the growing popularity of e-readers [...]

Ed Falco (Virginia Tech) is the author of the latest installment in the Godfather saga, a prequel to Mario Puzo’s original.  In The Family Corleone, Falco answers questions that have burned in fans’ minds for years – like Vito Corleone’s rise in the criminal underworld and how he became the Godfather.  It seems like an offer [...]

How many Victorian books would you have to read to know the Victorians? What if you could read all 1.7 million? Fred Gibbs (George Mason University) co-created a project that does just that. Using digital tools, he can search and then chart how frequently certain words—like “God,” “love,” and “science”—appear in all of 19th-century British [...]

On college campuses, female students continue to outnumber male students. Films like Knocked Up and television shows like Last Man Standing suggest that being a man in America is ever more difficult. Real American men, so the narrative goes, are disappearing. David Magill (Longwood University) explores the myths and realities of the male crisis. Also [...]