Now for Sale in Chicago: Prime Catholic Church Real Estate
The Wall Street Journal
“The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago has tapped an adviser to sell the sprawling lot across the street from its 140-year-old Holy Name Cathedral, in the latest sign of a religious institution selling prime real estate in response to hot property markets. … The trend has been particularly dramatic in many Northeast and Midwest cities that have lost population or where demographic shifts have resulted in smaller congregations for some denominations. For example, many of the parishioners who used to support New York’s Episcopal and Presbyterian churches moved to other parts of the country over the decades, according to Barry Kosmin, professor at the Institute for the study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College. Meanwhile, “in parts of the South they’re still building churches,” Mr. Kosmin pointed out…

The Anti-Social Campaign
U.S. News & World Report
Hispanic Christians were eager to hear from the leading presidential candidates as they gathered in California last weekend. … “If you think about what’s going on in the states, like on abortion and religious liberty, it’s clear that there’s a lot of interest in the social issues,” says Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Connecticut. “On the other hand, there isn’t much going on at the national level,” including in the presidential campaign, Silk adds.  “Nobody’s talking much about Obamacare, much less rolling back same-sex marriage or even abortion,” he says. “My sense is that at the national set of issues, these things matter less than they used to.”…

High School Student Hopes New App Will Make Hartford Safer
Hartford Courant
…Hundreds of students worked this year under the guidance of their computer science teachers, all of whom received training at Trinity College through a program called the Mobile Computer Science Principles project. … The app expo day is part of a National Science Foundation-funded project led by Ralph Morelli, a Trinity College professor of computer science. The effort is designed to train high school educators to teach computer science through the use of app development. “There’s a national crisis in computer science education,” Morelli said. “The main problem is one word: equity. Not enough girls in high school and K-12 and underrepresented minorities are studying computer science … If you leave them out, then you don’t have enough people in computer science.”…

Renowned squash coach gives advice to SCH students
Chestnut Hill Local (Philadelphia)
Paul Assaiante, perhaps the most renowned squash and tennis coach in the collegiate sports world, visited Springside Chestnut Hill Academy on Thursday, May 5, to give a talk on success. Although recently retired from coaching tennis, Assaiante remains the head coach of the highly successful, long-lived dynasty that is the Trinity College squash team in Hartford, Conn. That team’s 14-year, 252-game unbeaten streak remains the longest of its kind in intercollegiate sports in the United States. Assaiante wrote and published an acclaimed book called Run To The Roar with James Zug in 2010, which captured more than just his experiences as a coach. The book explains not only how to face one’s fears but contains a dedicated apology to his children for not raising them as he would’ve hoped, and how the squash arena is actually “nothing more than how you treat people.” “You can accomplish amazing things by doing so,” he said….

Trinity Professor’s Personal & Professional Skills Result in New Resource for Parents
Hartford Courant
Trinity College Professor, Molly Helt, has co-authored an activity book for early treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders.  While she is a Hartford researcher – recently looking at whether there’s a link between maternal estrogen and autism risk – she is also the mother of a son with the developmental disorder. The Activity Kit for Babies and Toddlers at Risk: How to Use Everyday Routines to Build Social and Communication Skills (The Guilford Press, 2016) shows families – in easy-to-understand terms – how to support their child’s development by incorporating scientific principles into their day-to-day lives, even before receiving an official ASD diagnosis….

Author plumbs secret record of Warsaw Ghetto
New Jersey Jewish News
“The Warsaw Ghetto, scene of horrendous atrocities but also a place where Jewish heroism took full expression in a valiant uprising, will be the focus of this year’s Yom Hashoa observance at the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education.  Scheduled for Friday morning, May 6, the annual event will feature a talk by Samuel D. Kassow, a noted historian and author of Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto. Released in 2009 by Vintage, the book shines a light on the work of Emanuel Ringelblum and some 60 members of the Oneg Shabbat Archive, a group he organized to create a record of both life and death in the infamous ghetto. …  The author, 69, now the director of the Jewish Studies Program and Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Stuttgart, Germany…

Samba Fest At Riverfront Plaza
Hartford Courant
Samba is a rhythm and a style, but in Brazil the music and the aesthetic pervade the culture in something like the way the blues informs just about all American popular music in some manner. There wouldn’t be bossa nova without samba. So it makes good sense that Trinity College has been hosting an annual samba fest for years now. Music professor Eric Galm studied in Rio, wrote his dissertation on Brazilian music and leads an impressively energetic samba drumming group that would be right at home at Carnival. The festival connects the Hartford area’s sizeable Brazilian population and music lovers in general with the bubbly rhythms of Rio and Bahia. This year’s free event will feature numerous brass, steel and samba bands…