University Station to University Station.

An advantage to getting up early. As badly as it messes up my day if I wake up even a half hour early, it's the only way you catch certain things, these gorgeous sunrises for instance. We're out of the monsoons so things are drying out and there's more particulate matter being stirred up by the autumnal winds. And the later church services at  Christ's Church, Denver start at 10:30 so, to be on time, I need to get up at 6:00 to give my heart medications time to get into my system, and be out at 8:00 in case I have to wait a half hour on the train at Arapahoe Station. 

Since I'm hiking in my old neighborhood around University Boulevard, I decided to visit my old church there. I have friends and many good memories there and am considering returning for an Advent service next month. It's a depressingly rare event. This is only the second time since I moved over three years ago. (I've been there several times, still associated with their library.)

The University campus is always good for a stroll. The building in the foreground, the Cable Building, isn't actually a part of the University, being a monument to the cable industry. It's not immediately apparent how prominent the cable industry is in Denver.

There is that appropriately abstract statue in front of the Cable Building.

But it fits with the powerful and cyclopean aesthetic of the rest of the campus. Here's yet another shot of the Newman Center for the Arts. That's okay....I like the building with it's towers, rose window that actually look like a rose, and sun dial.

Between the college and the residential parts of University Boulevard is a row of high rise apartments.

It's fall and all the non-indigenous plants along the boulevard are in full color.

Cherry Hills is an affluent neighborhood but Christ's Church, in the middle of it all, is a varied mix of a lot of different kinds of people that get along like a family. It's refreshing to experience. It's an Episcopal church but a large proportion of the congregation is Baptist and another is Catholic. Lake Woebegone should take notes.

The emphasis that day was the Feast of All Souls. Many don't realize that Halloween and it's associated All Hallows Day and the Feast of All Souls are not pagan celebrations.... they're Christian from their inception.

Syncretism is almost a human process. If you can't beat them, absorb them. I have no problem with that but I'm necessarily a pagan Christian. Being a werewolf in the church sorta demands it. Syncretism is a fusion of cultures. Halloween is a good example. Many cultures, pagan and Christian, are concerned with people who have died and "gone on". Samhain was (is) one of four seasonal, originally Gaelic festivals marking the end of harvest and beginning of the darker part of the year. It was thought that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest at this time so celebration of relationships with those who had died including defense against the "dangerous dead" was appropriate.

The natural Christian equivalent was remembrance of departed Christians. Canonized saints were Christians who were exemplary in some way, often martyrdom or the performance of miracles. They had special days of recognition, feast days or other celebrations. But for most parts of the Christian church, all believers are considered saints and recognition of all the saints whose lives are not celebrated by special days occurs at the end of October and the start of November. Halloween is "all hallows evening", the night before All Hallows Day.

It was a good visit. I was surprised that, after over three years absence, so many people would remember me. Of course, these were people who stood by me when a mysterious ailment put me out of operation for a month. A church family is true family.

My favorite "Halloween hymn" is Ralph ("Rafe" not "Ralf") Vaughan Williams' "For all the saints" and that was threaded all through the service. It's as if they knew I would be there. And All Saints' Day isn't just for remembrance of departed friends and family. It's a day of welcoming and baptisms.

Advent Season is coming up and I'll be trying to visit again. By the way, in Orthodox Christianity, Advent comes before Christmas.... they're two different things.

After services, I headed back to the train station with a short stop at the main intersection on campus for a milk shake.

That doesn't look like a very old university but keep in mind that Denver was established in 1861 and there was no city here before 1858 when gold was discovered in Colorado. The Denver isn't much older than the University of Denver.

The requisite shot of the Rockies (heh, that phrase is now in my spell checker)....the last time I took an elevator to the top deck of the RTD parking garage, the mountains were not even visible because of the weather. Here are some more shots from up there 

The Valley Highway (Interstate 25) and University Station.

The campus and more mountains 

More of the campus and the mountains. If you enlarge the photograph, you can see Pike's Peak just over the end of the (curved) Cable Building.

Across the Interstate toward Washington Park, which will be a destination for my next station-to-station hike. There's also a good view of the Denver skyline.

Back at Village Center (Arapahoe Station) I saw these shiny grasses. Grasses really are underrated as ornamentals, but when you live on the plains, they rise in prominence. I'm going to guess that these are Miscanthus sinensis, or Silver grass.

It's cool how different light so drastically changes the appearance of things.

Are there places in your area that hold a deep significance for you. It's fun to dig deeper and learn more about them. They make good hiking destinations.

--- Sociology in the colleges ---

The social sciences cover a very large conceptual area. Any situation in which more than one person is interacting is social. Even when there is only one person, the way they think about other people is social. So, it's no wonder that I can't just tell you what the universities around here focus on in the social sciences. From what I've said about psychology, philosophy, and religion in the area, you probably aren't to surprised that a lot of it is about social justice.

I didn't travel to Boulder for this one but I did look over the School of Sociology website. I noticed that they do have a focus on criminology, like Denver University. It lists four working groups that come together to discuss topics in sociology and I assume that those give some idea of what's going on there in research - what's in vogue. Those groups are:

Criminology and Criminal Justice Working Group
Culture, Power and Inequality Working Group
Political Economy Working Group
Population and Health Working Group

I did walk down the street to the Denver University and had a nice day of it. A major emphasis there seems to be criminology. For instance, one of the professors, Jared Del Rosso is doing some significant work about the public perception of torture.

The main building for sociology is the Strum Hall. The School of Sociology and Criminology is the largest on campus, consisting of 15 schools and departments.

                                                                  [Sturm Hall]

Sturm Hall also houses the Denver University Museum of Anthropology. The public part of the museum is one small room but museums like this are my favorite. It is a teaching museum. Students interact with items in the less public museum holdings to create installations displaying their academic work. The study is ongoing, the information is current, and the displays deeply consider the items, the people who created them, the students who study them, and the visitor who views them.

When I visited, there was an installation about Korean shadow puppetry. The text on the wall emphasizes the importance of the shadow in the human psyche.

                                                                        [Shadow]

The displayed artifacts were primarily Asian and North American (much was Hopi).

                                                                      [Display]

"Activating the Collections" makes explicit what this museum is about. I'll let the museum, itself, explain.

                                                  [Activating the Collections]

The museum offered a book written by a professor at Denver University. I didn't expect much - I got much more. Sarah Milledge Nelson's Spirit Bird Journey is an engaging, very well written, but odd little story that weaves three threads together. It is a fascinating description of Korean culture that tells of an archeologist's research in Korea, and also tells of her spirit journey as a bird to paleolithic Korea. Part scientific expedition, part shamanic fairy tale, this novel is informed throughout by the author's own archaeological expertise, knowledge of Asian history and culture, and an excellent handling of narrative.

I decided to buy a copy for a friend and found that new paperback versions are hard to find - perhaps out of print. The original publisher was RKLOG Press in Littleton, Colorado but all I could find were used copies, hardbacks, and digital copies.

I also noticed that the author has written other novels and academic books. I will have to check them out.

Leaving the museum, I was treated to a stroll through the water gardens.

                                                                      [Water gardens]

The semicircular plaque looks like a sundial or some kind of astrolabe but it actually points out the mountains that you can see from this point in the gardens. As you can see, in the summer, there are too many trees. Most of the campus is an arboretum.

                                                                   [Mountains]

I have been passing a small wine bar for some time. Hiking, I'm not drawn to wine or espresso, but this time I stopped in and was delighted to be reacquainted with Italian sodas - the perfect drink for a hot summer day. I'm now identifying all the places around town where I can get Italian sodas. La Belle Rosette, on University Drive just south of the campus is now a favorite stop - friendly people with Italian sodas in the summer and specialty espresso drinks in the winter. What more could I ask for?

Are there any teaching museums in your area? They often are on college campuses but, not always. My favorite paleontological museum in the area is the Museum of Natural History in Morrison, which is also a research site. Again, it's a small museum but the staff is on the cutting edge of paleontology and the tours are packed with up-to-date information about fossils in an area where fossils are big.