On the 5th day of the First Year Honors group’s stay in Hawaii, we visited the Polynesian Cultural Center. After a long, sun drenched day full of information, performances, and beautiful scenery, most of us came away with a deeper understanding of Polynesian culture and the complex traditions preserved in places like the PCC (Polynesian Cultural Center).
To end our first week on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i, the 2026 Jan term Honors class went down to Mokulē‘ia Army Beach, a 2-minute drive from our camp, to clean up trash from the beach for an hour. We split up into groups of 3 to 6, turning our project into a little competition of which group could collect the most trash.
The prospect of entire languages going extinct, however, introduces questions: What is lost when a language dies? How do we revive a dying language?
Every day, an average of 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed across the world, and while Hawaiian grown coffee beans account for less than 1 percent of annual United States coffee consumption, the state still takes great pride in their coffee production.
There has been a new initiative within the Honors Program to emphasize peer mentorship. Within the last few weeks, Honors Junior and Senior mentors met with their underclassmen mentees.
Whitworth is the proud host of a literary journal called Script. Script is a completely student-run journal that has been producing editions since 1987, and this year’s edition is collecting submissions from several new categories.
Your Planning Guide to 2026 Jan Term, Spring, and Summer Registration!
A core part of the Honors Program here at Whitworth is our final capstone project.
Kyle Marquez spent his summer interning with the Department of Agriculture, specifically the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Washington.
Whitworth’s Office of Church Engagement runs the Summer Fellowship Program, which places students with churches, camps, and nonprofits nationwide.
Honors Sophomore Completes Pre-Law Internship Abby Ruffcorn, political science major and Whitworth Class of 2027, shares about her internship at a local law firm:
I’ve always considered it a blessing to have been raised in an environment that exposed me to different types of peoples and cultures. I am
There has been a new initiative within the Honors Program to emphasize peer mentorship. Within the last few weeks, Honors Junior and Senior mentors met with their underclassmen mentees.
Whitworth is the proud host of a literary journal called Script. Script is a completely student-run journal that has been producing editions since 1987, and this year’s edition is collecting submissions from several new categories.
The Whitworth Democracy Lab’s Banned Book Club hosted our 2025 Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week ran from Oct 5-11 this year. The Banned Book Club finished reading 1984 by George Orwell and initiated several projects on campus.
When reading current or aged literature pieces, in Spanish, English, or any other language, the words we encounter in our readings can feel timeless or oddly foreign. The use of linguistic terms can tell the reader a lot – not just about the language itself, but about the period the piece was written in and how languages have evolved alongside their culture, class, and other impacting aspects.
To end our first week on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i, the 2026 Jan term Honors class went down to Mokulē‘ia Army Beach, a 2-minute drive from our camp, to clean up trash from the beach for an hour. We split up into groups of 3 to 6, turning our project into a little competition of which group could collect the most trash.
The prospect of entire languages going extinct, however, introduces questions: What is lost when a language dies? How do we revive a dying language?
Every day, an average of 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed across the world, and while Hawaiian grown coffee beans account for less than 1 percent of annual United States coffee consumption, the state still takes great pride in their coffee production.
Honors Political Science student, Nyah Hill, spends Spring 2025 in Tanzania learning everything she can about her home away from home.
With the overturing of Roe V Wade came a plague of misinformation surrounding reproductive health. This led to medical practitioners and specialists being misinformed and fearing prosecution for providing lifesaving procedures on pregnant women. Reproductive healthcare doesn’t just involve abortion, it includes emergency care, about the right to survive a pregnancy. The misinformation flooding the system is making everything worse. State laws are murky and full of vague language state by state, leaving medical professionals unsure if they’d be prosecuted for providing necessary, lifesaving care for their patients. To me, it is wrong that in a first world country, people are left to suffer because of this misinformation. My goal is to bring light to proper information about abortion care even in the most restrictive states.
Immigration has long been a contentious issue in the U.S., but recent years have seen increasingly negative public attitudes shaped by race, religion, politics, and nationalism. Notably, research shows that white evangelical Christians often support restrictive immigration policies—despite professing compassion and a biblical call to welcome the stranger. This study explores how those contradictions play out locally in Spokane, Washington, by centering the voices of immigrants and refugees and examining how race, religion, and legal status shape their resettlement experiences.
My honors capstone project investigates how systemic marginalization affects the political participation and lived experiences of religious minorities in Pakistan, focusing particularly on Christian communities in Karachi. Through qualitative research involving semi-structured interviews, I examined how fear, discrimination, and historical shifts in state ideology contribute to political disengagement. Participants expressed deep frustration with exclusionary practices, legal discrimination through blasphemy laws, and socio-economic disenfranchisement. Yet, I also uncovered stories of remarkable resilience such as communities leveraging civil society, clustering in safe neighborhoods, and using social media as new platforms for political expression.
As a Christian in the science field, these two dominant fields have always been a big part of my learning and worldview. During our time at Cambridge, we read a book by Yuval Harari titled Sapeins. In this book, Yuval Harari is attempting to tell the story of science throughout human history. I observed that in this attempt, Harari is guilty of placing science in a bubble, ignoring big changes going on in the world, specifically around the Scientific Revolution. This realization, paired with my strong passion and fascination for science and religion, led me to desire to be able to better prove that these two fields are not in conflict.
