Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

I spent the past weekend participating in an academic conference I regularly attend (Society for the Scientific Study of Religion). I have a number of friends and colleagues who attend and we had a good time together. But I have to tell about one session at the conference.

The conference organizer – who did a great job – was looking for conveners for sessions several months back and I volunteered (trying to be a good citizen and all). I ended up convening a session with four papers, none of which seemed to go together very well. But I can usually find something interesting in a paper, so I approached the session positively. I contacted all of the presenters about 2 months in advance and asked that they send me a copy of their paper a couple weeks ahead of the conference so I could read them and have some questions/feedback for them. I got virtually no response. One presenter did finally send a half written paper about a week before the conference, which I dutifully read. Otherwise, nothing. That’s really not that big of a deal, but so it goes.

I arrived to the session with plenty of time to help them get everything set up. As is often the case these days, one person had a laptop and the others all loaded their presentations on to that laptop via thumb drive so we didn’t have to switch laptops mid-session. Everything seemed to be going well. The first presenter gave his quantitative presentation – no problem. The second presentation was a combined presentation with two people giving parts. It, too, was a quantitative paper. Again – no problem (though one of the presenters had a very cool, thick Texas accent). Then we get to the third paper. This happened to be the one I read. It was an ethnography of a rock and roll church (basically, a church with electric guitars and rock music). She started in on her presentation and got about 3 or 4 minutes into it when the laptop went apeshit on her. Unlike most laptops when they lose power, this one didn’t just shut down – it started flashing psychedelic images on the screen. I figured it was the power (which it was – the power cord had come out somehow), but commented that it was a nice backdrop for a presentation on a rock and roll church. The laptop owner (the first presenter) rushed up to the front to fix the problem while the presenter continued. About 2 minutes after the laptop went psychedelic on us, a member of the audience fell out of his chair completely and landed rather hard on the floor. Everyone was concerned, but he picked himself up and said he was fine, that he had just fallen asleep! The laptop came back to life a couple minutes later and normality was returned to the session. Temporarily…

The third presenter finished her presentation then passed the laptop on to the fourth, whose presentation was fine until almost the last slide, when she flashed one word on the screen – paraclete. Paraclete is Greek for “comforter” and is often used to refer to the Holy Ghost, which is how she was using it her. Her talk was on succession issues in megachurches. At this point she paused and said (paraphrasing), “We cannot underestimate the importance of the Holy Spirit in succession issues.” I almost choked on the air I was breathing in – huh? This is an academic conference, right? Since when do we pretend we can quantify the Holy Spirit? Unfortunately she felt so strongly about the importance of the paraclete in leadership succession that she spent a good couple of minutes on this rather bizarre element of her talk. This is the first (and hopefully the last) time I’ve seen this approach at this conference and I wasn’t the only person there who was uncomfortable. Bizarre!

Anyway, that was definitely the most “lively” session I attended. I do have to mention one other incident that is sticking in my mind. The conference was in a hotel in downtown Tampa. As I’m just learning, there are not a lot of great restaurants in downtown Tampa open on Sundays or during conference hours, so my colleagues and I had to scout out the area. Sunday, after the conference had ended, we went out to lunch. I was walking with Mike Nielsen (whose Psychology of Religion blog I recommend) back to my car after lunch when we saw a homeless person (who looked pretty beat up and run down) fishing for a cup in the garbage can just outside the restaurant we visited. Both Mike and I started toward him, but Mike beat me to the punch – he gave the man his drink and the man graciously accepted it. Send some kudos Mike’s way when you get a chance. He is one of those rare individuals who studies peace, non-violence, and justice and practices what he studies in his everyday life.

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Now playing: R.E.M. – Have You Ever Seen the Rain (live)
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We spent the weekend in Portland, OR, attending a conference called: Challenging Assumptions: Religious Faith, Genetic Science, and Human Dignity. It was an intriguing conference. There were probably 50 to 75 people who attended at some point. This was both nice and awkward. It was nice because we couldn’t help but get a chance to meet some of the more notable attendees (e.g., Dean Hamer, Joseph Graves, Jr., Ted Peters), but it also meant we only had about 4 people attend our paper presentation. Overall, the experience was definitely worth the trip. (Ask me some time about Dean Hamer’s thoughts on his recent book, The God Gene – funny story. Also, for future reference, Ted Peters said in his presentation, “I don’t think there is a future in therapeutic cloning.” Just a note for when therapeutic cloning takes off.

We arrived Friday around mid-day and checked into our hotel (Hotel Deluxe) then headed to a local vegan restaurant, Blossoming Lotus, for lunch. We then stopped by a coffee shop to do some work (i.e., prepare our presentation for the next day). The conference started later that night, at around 7:00 pm. Saturday we spent the entire day in the conference, attending presentations and giving our own. The conference technically ended Sunday morning with a breakfast with the authors, but we had too many other things to do and ended up missing it.

Given we were flying across the country, our flights were very odd. Our flight to Portland got us there very early, but our flight home left at 11:35pm and we flew overnight to Tampa (not fun). That left us with most of the day Sunday to explore Portland. We rented a car and headed up the Columbia River Valley, stopping at Multnomah Falls and the Bonneville Dam along the way to Hood River, where we stopped for lunch at an inexpensive pizza place – Pietro’s (I had hoped to stop at a nice place, but it only opened for dinner). From Hood River we headed south and looped around Mount Hood, which is a truly amazing mountain. We then headed back to Portland, stopping at the Rose Garden before heading to an awesome vegan restaurant for dinner – Nutshell (no website, but a must for vegetarians visiting Portland).

Here are a couple pics from the trip:

Debi at Multnomah Falls

The amazing Mt. Hood

Debi at the Rose Garden

I had to teach all day the Monday we returned. Our flight got in around 10:15 and I had class at 11:30. We drove, literally, straight from the airport to campus where I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, then headed to class. I basically collapsed when I got home Monday night. Flying over night is never fun; following that up with classes all day is a nightmare.

In other news – I got the “bright” idea a couple weeks ago while making a scrumptious butternut squash soup to, instead of discarding the seeds, let the seeds dry up then plant them to see if we can raise some squash of our own. We went out and bought a few clay pots and some planting soil and planted a few of the seeds (we have tons of seeds from just the one squash). It only took about 5 days before we had sprouts. Now we’re trying to figure out what to do with them as our little pots aren’t going to be able to hold full squashes. We’ll see if we can keep these alive until they actually produce some squash – it’s kind of a fun experiment.

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Now playing: David and Steve Gordon – Empowered
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The staff of SNL couldn’t let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad get away with homosexuality denying:

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Now playing: Jon Hendricks – Jive Samba
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Debi and I had our first birding outing last Sunday. A couple of professors at UT we’ve gotten to know are big into birding and took us out bright and early Sunday morning to get a taste for it. We went out to Brooker Creek Preserve and spent a couple hours peering through binoculars looking for birds. I have to admit I was more impressed with the humongous spiders everywhere along the path, but the birding was loads of fun. I was amazed at how good our friends had become at determining what kind of bird was near just by its call. Granted they are biologists and they’ve been doing this for quite a while, but still, it was amazing.

On a different note, I’m getting ready to teach my Intro. classes about stratification and thought I’d make it a little more meaningful by putting together a stratification pyramid here in Tampa. Here’s one of the one’s I came up with:

Not too surprisingly, the top 6% of Tampanians make about 30% of the money. The bottom 50% make about 20% of the money.

(Note: I’m not sure what people from Tampa go by yet; I was thinking of my options – Tamponian, Tampon, Tampian, Tamper – and decided I like Tampanian best.)

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Now playing: 10,000 Maniacs – Planned Obsolescence
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Debi and I went to a professional football game yesterday – Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. New Orleans Saints. In fact, we even had $250/seat tickets for club seating. Here are a couple pics (from my crappy cellphone camera) as evidence:

Here’s Debi at the game:

Here’s a shot of the famed pirate ship:

And here’s a shot of the action on the field:

We watched the Buccaneers clobber New Orleans.

So, you must be asking yourself at this point, how did Ryan and Debi, two people who follow American Football about as close as most people follow developments in penile implants, end up in $250 seats at the first home game of the NFL season for the Buccaneers? One of my (Ryan’s) colleagues at the University of Tampa entered a raffle for four expensive tickets to the game to benefit the athletic department. He won and invited us to go along with him and another friend of his. Long story short, someone gave us tickets and, since we always said we should go to a professional sports game at some point, we went.

It was actually kind of fun. We learned quite a bit about the whole enterprise. First off, the sheer number of people who can fit into that stadium is amazing – 65,000 (or 75,000 if expanded). People also take NFL football very seriously here in Tampa. According to one of the people we attended with, all of the seats in the stadium are season tickets, meaning every game is sold out well in advance. Additionally, tailgating starts hours before the game and thousands turn out for it. All this got me to thinking – we had decent seats, but definitely not the best seats in the stadium, and our tickets were worth $250 a piece (I’m not kidding; it almost made us sick when we thought about how much they cost). If you assume that the average ticket costs $200, and every game is sold out, that’s $13 million per game in tickets alone. Add to that concessions and merchandise ($4 per bottle of water) and each game probably brings in close to $20 million just from the fans in attendance. (Add to that merchandising, advertising, TV contracts, etc. and you’re probably talking somewhere closer to $30 million per game).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the cost of attending a game is the ramifications ticket prices have for racial and ethnic diversity. A recent glance at the U.S. Census Bureau’s website indicated that the city of Tampa is 25.3% black and 24% Hispanic. I saw more black cheerleaders (3 out of 36) than I did black fans in the stands (okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; I saw a group of 6 or so New Orleans fans who were black, but that’s about it). There were also very few Hispanics. This is an intriguing side effect of exorbitant ticket costs – it prices out racial and ethnic minorities.

One final comment – cheerleaders! One of the people with whom we attended said that the cheerleaders were all volunteers. I found that hard to believe considering how “professional” they looked and performed, so I did a little sleuthing online. According to this wikipedia page, NFL cheerleaders work “part-time”, though it is more like a full-time job. That would seem to indicate they get paid for their work, which would only make sense considering the time commitment – at least 4 or 5 hours actually performing every week, in addition to a number of hours practicing and lots of touring. Even so, they really don’t make much money directly from the team (see here). They can earn quite a bit from making appearances. And, of course there are the side deals for merchandising, as most NFL cheerleading squads have calendars as well. So, while I don’t have solid evidence that NFL cheerleaders are making big bucks, I’m pretty confident they do get paid.

Overall, the game was entertaining. We had good company and, even though it was a blow out, it was an upset blow out and the fans really got into the game. The only drawback was how hot it was. Just sitting there we were all sweating profusely (close to 91 degrees and 90% humidity). Otherwise, it would have been very entertaining. Probably not $500 worth of entertaining, but $20, easily (which is what we spent on concessions just to keep from becoming dehydrated). Would I do it again? If I had another set of free tickets and couldn’t sell them on EBay, yeah, probably.

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Now playing: Solas – The Unquiet Grave
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