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Fear Itself
Be afraid. Be very afraid. This is what October is all about. Even though the supermarket has been stocked with Halloween candy since the day after Labor Day and some of the neighbors decorated their front porches with jack-o-lanterns and fake cobwebs back in September, now is the time to bask in the haunted glow leading up to Halloween. Of course, when I was a kid, I thought the scariest holiday was Passover with its spooky Angel of Death. But now that I’m older and wiser, I realize that I didn’t grow up on Elm Street (as in “The Nightmare on Elm Street”) just to become an insomniac. Heck no! It’s so that I could spend nearly every evening in October watching scary movies with my husband, an expert in horror flicks. It’s human nature to want to feel scared watching something that you know is just a movie. It’s spine-chilling escapism and a chance to yell at the television screen. How stupid are these characters and why must I scream out to caution them about the evil-doer lurking in the shadows? In real life, we can fear the real deal stuff: inflation, an impending recession, the wrong person winning an all-important election, war, climate change, nuclear apocalypse, toilet paper shortages. There are so many metaphorical boogeymen that sometimes it’s hard to know what to fear and when. But in October, all that goes out the window as we cuddle up with our pumpkin spice lattes and a bowl of popcorn imagining that Freddie Kruger or Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers or Leatherface or some other scary someone is out for blood. We hope and pray that the bad guys will get what they deserve, and for a second we are comforted by the knowledge that they have met their fate until we see them pop up from the dead and we know what is about to happen next. That’s right, a sequel is in the making and if you've seen the sequels, you know how truly frightening that can be.
Stay safe and healthy,
Tracy Jacobs
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The Glen Arboretum is an outdoor resource for students that occupies approximately 12 acres of wooded land. The area was dedicated to Towson University in 1936 to provide an educational experience for the community and maintain plants native to Maryland.
For the ninth year in a row, one of TU's most iconic campus visitors came ba-a-a-ck. On Oct. 6-7, 12 goats from Harmony Church Farm in Darlington, Maryland, came to the Glen to snack on invasive plant species as part of campus sustainability efforts.
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Baltimore Hebrew Institute at Towson University Presents
Jewish Messianism in Modernity
Book Event | Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought
Thursday, October 27, 6:30 p.m.
College of Liberal Arts, Room 4110
A panel discussion relating to the book Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought, authored by Gilad Sharvit, an Assistant Professor in Towson University's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. The book proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book describes how the ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical gave rise to a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of “dynamic repetition” in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought.
Guest panelists joining Dr. Sharvit are Martin Shuster, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy & Issac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at UNC Charlotte and Andrea A. Sinn, Ph.D., O'Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History and Geography at Elon University.
Reception following. There is no charge to attend.
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Support Osher at Towson University. Your tax-deductible contribution helps to provide a rich experience for our members and a vibrant, affordable program for years to come.
Donate online through the link below. If you prefer to donate by check, please make check payable to “Towson University Foundation, Inc.” and note Osher fund in the memo line. Mail to: Towson University Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 17165, Baltimore, MD 21297-0219.
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