They are a people without a country — more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees who were trapped between a nation that disowned them and another that wouldn’t take them.

For two decades they languished in United Nations refugee camps with nothing but bamboo huts covered by plastic tarps and meager rations, toiletries and other essentials. Then in 2007, the United States and other countries agreed to end their plight and take in the refugees. More than 22,000 have already immigrated, settling in cities across the country like Jacksonville, Fla.

A Covenant of Understanding

Student planning to become priest chooses internship at synagogue to better understand other religions

Flagler senior Briggs Hurley stands at the altar practicing Hebrew prayers. Overhead the wording in Hebrew translates into, “Know before whom you stand.” Behind him is a beautiful pane of handmade stained glass in vibrant colors.

Rabbi Mark Goldman, dressed immaculately, interrupts Hurley to admonish him for wearing shorts and flip flops to temple.

Religion At the Extremes

Flagler Assistant Professor’s Book Tries to Make Sense of Religion Being Used to Justify Violence

Osama bin Laden and Mohandas Gandhi are two names you wouldn’t expect to share the same cover of a book.

While the first is an international pariah whose acts of terrorism have brought fear, suffering, hatred and war, the second chose a path of absolute nonviolence as he waged his own “battles” to free India from British Imperial rule.

Art & Design

Senior Graphic Design Major is Never Short of a Canvas for Bold Illustrations
Design-heavy street art with grit and detail is how 22-year-old Hahau Yisrael defines his work.

Yisrael, a graphic design major and advertising minor graduating this spring, doesn’t speak about art the way many have been taught. He understands the importance of balance and perspective, but uses them on his own terms. He doesn’t stick to a particular medium – combining coffee grounds, spray paint, ink, charcoal, henna and acrylics.

Making Sense of the Senseless

Alumna Mallory Needleman works with recordings of Holocaust survivors at Holocaust Museum

Mallory Needleman gets paid to listen to horror stories. As an assistant outreach and archival researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she catalogues and fact checks interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the Nazi Germany genocide that killed roughly 6 million European Jews.

The 2008 Flagler alumna works with about 1,600 of the museum’s audio and video accounts of the Holocaust’s everyday atrocities: not just the typical shootings and mass graves, but unexpected details – like a neighbor who found the village’s Jewish tailor with all his teeth gone, pulled for their tiny gold fillings.

Volleyball caps dream season with final four appearance

A thrilling 2009 season that featured a 29-match winning streak took the Flagler College volleyball team many places over the course of the year.

It was only fitting that such a magical run ended with the team in St. Paul, Minn., site of the NCAA Division II Volleyball Championship, making angels in the snow.

The Business of Space

Alumnus Mike Galluzzi works to eliminate redundancies in America’s space program while NASA transitions from the shuttle to the moon and beyond

Mike Galluzzi, ’88, is in the business of space. And right now the space business is in a period of transition.

The current shuttle program is set to retire by September 2010, leaving a gap in human space transportation for at least a few years while the new “Constellation” program takes off. Constellation’s plans echo the heyday of the space program with exploration of the moon and eventually manned missions to Mars.

Architectural Scavenger Hunt

For alumni, going to Flagler meant being constantly surrounded by architectural gems and detail work that was the hallmark of the former Ponce de Leon Hotel — today a National Historic Landmark. But while you might have seen them every day, how well do you remember all of those intricate accents around campus? Test your memory — and take a stroll down memory lane — by naming where the architectural details pictured here are found on campus.

Click on the image to get started.

Photos by Scott Smith, ‘04

A Day in the Life: Gabe Jacobs-Kierstein

Theater seems so … well … dramatic. But it’s not all bright lights and adoring audiences. What you see on stage is the culmination of a lot of hard work behind the scenes before anyone takes a seat. Before the actors even step on stage, there’s plenty of pre-performance preparation from make-up and cast meetings to line rehearsing and psyching themselves up in a host of unique ways.

For love and meaning

English professor Liz Robbins talks poetry, publishing and truth

It’s hard to define “success” in the publishing world these days. As major publishing firms struggle to turn a profit, it’s more difficult than ever to get a traditional contract. Meanwhile, self-publishing companies – which let anyone print their work, for a fee – are rapidly expanding. But the books they publish sometimes reach just dozens of readers – as opposed to, say, a million.

Flagler Assistant Professor of English Liz Robbins is finding success somewhere in between those two extremes. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Hope, As The World Is A Scorpion Fish,” was published by small, Nebraska-based The Backwaters Press in 2008 and has sold more than 1,000 copies.