Religion 340 is limited to graduating seniors because it is designed to
1) demonstrate that life-long learning can be a pleasure,
2) traditional textbook-and-lecture classes can be transformed by classroom participation, and
3) the transition from college into the "real world" can include a different type of learning experience than normal.
Enjoy one another's company one last semester, relax, and prepare to meet the world boldly upon graduating. Soft drinks, water, and iced tea are available in the faculty dining room serving area near our AAAS meeting room. We’ll also have snacks in the room to tide us over until dinner. Previous seminars have recommended that we serve buttermilk fried chicken each Thursday. We’ll try that and see how you respond to it. The vegetables and desserts will vary. Some of you recall eating buttermilk fried chicken at Abby’s every Wednesday, until it closed. Salad will also be available—or if you wish, you can go upstairs and load up and bring your tray down to the Montgomery Room (Faculty Dining Room). Please courteous to our guests when they stay for dinner and try to be seated with one of them.
Unless otherwise arranged, you are expected not to miss any class session or to be late or leave early.
Readings for the sessions will appear in our Religion 340 blog. Read or scan the week's readings in preparation for the class each Thursday. Feel free to interrupt guest presenters with comments and questions. Enter heartily into discussions. Attendance, participation in discussion, evidence of doing the weekly readings, sending thank-yous, reporting on three service attendances, a research paper, and a closing project will all be parts of your grade. Everyone begins with an A grade. That declines when and if you shirk on these expectations.
Each Friday, we will send you addresses for the guest speakers who appeared the day before. You are expected to send personal thank-you notes to all guests as soon after their appearances as possible. (The cost of postage is about your only expense for the class.) There will be a pile of cards and envelopes at the February 7th opening session. Count out 25 to take with you and to use for thank-yous.
Between now and Easter, attend three religious services of faiths other than your own, and write 1-2 page reports on each visit. Attach church/synagogue/mosque bulletins to reports, if available. Turn them in as you complete each. Reports are your personal reflections and impressions, maybe contrasting services with those with which you are already familiar. Be daring enough to try some adventuresome visits--evangelical church, Unitarian church, African-American church, synagogue, etc.
You will need to select a topic and prepare a 10-15 page paper on some American religious topic of interest* and significance, and be prepared to make a 7-10 minute oral summary of it for the class. The 2006 seminar wrote religious figure biographies. An earlier seminar group wrote papers on non-mainstream religions or religious practices. We compile the papers and bind and publish them, so we need electronic copies, proof-read for errors and corrections, with footnotes (endnotes) and bibliographies in proper form.
Likely some special closing project will be designed for our final session, May lst.
You will receive periodic updates on the class session schedule, the research paper topic, and the closing project.
*The 2008 Class theme is "Religion and Politics."
