ENC-1101
- First-Year Composition, first component
- Taught Fall 2010
- Two sections of twenty-five students each
- Responsible for course design, reading list, grading, and classroom management
enc_1101_course_policy_sheet_section_46.doc | |
File Size: | 106 kb |
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enc_1101_syllabus_version_2.doc | |
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ENC-1102
- First-Year Composition, second component
- Taught Spring 2011
- One section of twenty-six students
- Responsible for course design, reading list, grading, and classroom management
- Created a unique paper prompt requiring students to use interview skills, negotiation, analysis, and mutual respect to find common ground on a subject they and their partner disagreed on
enc_1102_course_policy_sheet.docx | |
File Size: | 51 kb |
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spring_2011_syllabus.xls | |
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ENC-1145: Writing about Faith and Atheism
ENC-1145 is the first class that graduate teaching assistants design from their own writing interests. Because I have written about Buddhism, and because I realized that first-year students frequently wrestle with issues of belief but never have a chance to write about that intellectual struggle, I designed a course open to students of all faiths, and none at all.
- Taught Fall 2011 and Spring 2012
- Two sections of twenty-five students each
- Responsible for course design, reading list, grading, and classroom management
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Writing about Faith and Atheism is a course designed to help you write your way toward a deeper understanding of your own attitudes toward the larger questions of life. What does it mean to enjoy a life well-lived? Where does morality come from? What do the world’s great religions believe, and can you compare and contrast their views to your own? Do we need a deity? We won’t answer these questions, but we will wrestle with them. The course is centered on writing – you will explore your own beliefs, research the beliefs of another spiritual tradition, and analyze and critique how those beliefs fit into your day-to-day life. The goals are to help you write papers that are deeply thoughtful and analytical and also to help you learn how to use a paper to work through your thinking on an issue, even when you aren’t certain how you feel about it. Please note: respect for one another is a bottom-line requirement for this class. Practitioners of all religions are welcome, as are atheists. No one is assumed to be right or wrong, ever, including me.
Writing about Faith and Atheism is a course designed to help you write your way toward a deeper understanding of your own attitudes toward the larger questions of life. What does it mean to enjoy a life well-lived? Where does morality come from? What do the world’s great religions believe, and can you compare and contrast their views to your own? Do we need a deity? We won’t answer these questions, but we will wrestle with them. The course is centered on writing – you will explore your own beliefs, research the beliefs of another spiritual tradition, and analyze and critique how those beliefs fit into your day-to-day life. The goals are to help you write papers that are deeply thoughtful and analytical and also to help you learn how to use a paper to work through your thinking on an issue, even when you aren’t certain how you feel about it. Please note: respect for one another is a bottom-line requirement for this class. Practitioners of all religions are welcome, as are atheists. No one is assumed to be right or wrong, ever, including me.
Paper 1 -- This I Believe, 5-7 pages
This paper asks you to write a short spiritual autobiography. What do you believe? Have you given up religious beliefs, or maybe never had any to begin with? How did you come to your beliefs, and how have they changed over time? Do you believe something different from your family? How have you handled that? Have you ever had a spiritual crisis that challenged or crystallized your thinking? What happened, and how did it change you? Do you believe in a faith that is in the minority in this country? How has that affected you? How do you live out your beliefs day to day, or do you think beliefs are private and separate from our public living?
Another approach you could take is to look at a single divisive issue within your religious background: for example, what does Christian justice look like? Is it “an eye for an eye” or is it “judge not, lest ye be judged”? If you were the victim of an injustice and you wanted to respond out of your belief system, what would you do?
This also raises the question of why people who share the same beliefs and the same texts can believe extremely different things. If both are quoting the sacred text they share, and both are quoting it correctly, is it possible to for both to be simultaneously right? Or are some parts “more sacred” than others – and who decides that (and how)?
Has one element of the faith you were born or raised in (or the belief system you have now, if that’s different) ever persistently nagged at you because you just weren’t sure it was quite right? What is it? Wrestle with it here – by the time you’ve written several pages about it, you might just find your answer.
One way or another, the paper should live up to its title: “This I Believe.” Take a stand, be passionate. Write about the beliefs that matter most to you, the answers you have found so far to the questions, “Why are we here? What’s it all about?”
Paper 2 – Researching a Faith Different from Your Own 7-10 pages
This paper moves beyond personally exploring one’s own culture and asks you to critically analyze another. Research the beliefs of a faith different from your own (atheism is also an option for research). Find out what they believe, how their beliefs define their world, and how they put their beliefs into practice. You must cite at least five sources and use MLA format with a works cited page.
There are a lot of ways to approach this paper. Keep in mind the goal is not merely summary, but analysis. I don’t want to know that Sunnis and Shiites fight each other – I know that already. I want to know what you find beautiful, strange, or confusing about Islam. As one of my rules of writing says, “I don’t want to know what you read. I want to know your ideas about what you read.” You could compare and contrast one element of a faith with your own beliefs (i.e., Christian ideas of justice versus Hindu ideas of justice). You could explore levels of meaning of one element of a faith (surface meanings and deep meanings of Talmud or Koran quotes). You could explore how Tantric attitudes toward sex are diametrically opposed to Christian ideas about sex, and imagine what having “moral sex” is like in both cultures (Tantric practices are fascinating). Are some of the things you do considered moral in one belief system but not in another? Explore that. You might find the Native American Church, with its sacred use of peyote, an interesting topic. Can you find God through substances? The one thing I do not want is 7-10 very generic pages on the history and basic beliefs of X. That is not a college-level paper. For example: not “The Life of Severus Snape,” but “How Love Both Destroys and Saves Snape’s Character.” You might worry that you won’t be able to fill 7-10 pages with what seems like a narrow topic, but believe me, there is a lot more to talk about in that second title than there is in the first.
There is a minimum of 5 sources, which you will analyze and comment on, required to support your paper, drawing from a variety of source materials: library books, journals, magazines, newsprint, credible web publications, interviews, etc. You are also welcome to use images, but there will be a maximum of 5 images–you must cite them as you would your other sources (in MLA format) and the space they take up does not count toward your seven-page minimum (if you have a half-page of pictures, then you need a minimum of 7 ½ pages total).
What counts as an impartial source when it comes to faith? What doesn’t? How do you tell the difference between the two? One important guideline: don’t use information about one religious group that is provided by an opposing religious group. Don’t use an evangelical Christian website to get information on Islam, or an atheist website to get information on Christianity. Get information directly from the people who practice it. You can look at what opponents say about a faith and analyze those statements to see whether or not their criticisms are accurate, but don’t let someone’s worst enemies be your primary source of information about them.
Paper Three – A Working Guide to a Meaningful Life 5-7 pages
This is a paper that I hope you will keep long after this class is over. As with Paper 1, “This I Believe,” the title here will be the title of your paper. I want you to create your own personal guide to living a moral life. You can draw reasons and examples from all the faiths we’ve studied or just from your own tradition. Try to write this paper as though you were looking at your own life at its very end, as though you were on your deathbed. In those final moments, what is of most value to you? What moral traits have you cultivated within yourself? How do you want to be remembered? Looking from that perspective, what does it mean to have experienced “a life well lived”? What choices will you make now that will set you on that road? As Joan Baez says, “You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.”
Of course we’ll all say, “I want to be kind to others.” Back that up with statements from your spiritual tradition, or with something you’ve learned in this class. What do the great traditions say about kindness? If you’re an atheist, the emerging field of neuroethics might be of some interest here. You may say that a meaningful life means working to protect life, while someone else might say it means working to protect freedom of choice. A meaningful life might be working to reduce belief in religion because it is divisive, or working to encourage more religion because it is a foundation for morality. Whatever sources you use to support your working guide, the guide itself is for you and should reflect your values.
This paper asks you to write a short spiritual autobiography. What do you believe? Have you given up religious beliefs, or maybe never had any to begin with? How did you come to your beliefs, and how have they changed over time? Do you believe something different from your family? How have you handled that? Have you ever had a spiritual crisis that challenged or crystallized your thinking? What happened, and how did it change you? Do you believe in a faith that is in the minority in this country? How has that affected you? How do you live out your beliefs day to day, or do you think beliefs are private and separate from our public living?
Another approach you could take is to look at a single divisive issue within your religious background: for example, what does Christian justice look like? Is it “an eye for an eye” or is it “judge not, lest ye be judged”? If you were the victim of an injustice and you wanted to respond out of your belief system, what would you do?
This also raises the question of why people who share the same beliefs and the same texts can believe extremely different things. If both are quoting the sacred text they share, and both are quoting it correctly, is it possible to for both to be simultaneously right? Or are some parts “more sacred” than others – and who decides that (and how)?
Has one element of the faith you were born or raised in (or the belief system you have now, if that’s different) ever persistently nagged at you because you just weren’t sure it was quite right? What is it? Wrestle with it here – by the time you’ve written several pages about it, you might just find your answer.
One way or another, the paper should live up to its title: “This I Believe.” Take a stand, be passionate. Write about the beliefs that matter most to you, the answers you have found so far to the questions, “Why are we here? What’s it all about?”
Paper 2 – Researching a Faith Different from Your Own 7-10 pages
This paper moves beyond personally exploring one’s own culture and asks you to critically analyze another. Research the beliefs of a faith different from your own (atheism is also an option for research). Find out what they believe, how their beliefs define their world, and how they put their beliefs into practice. You must cite at least five sources and use MLA format with a works cited page.
There are a lot of ways to approach this paper. Keep in mind the goal is not merely summary, but analysis. I don’t want to know that Sunnis and Shiites fight each other – I know that already. I want to know what you find beautiful, strange, or confusing about Islam. As one of my rules of writing says, “I don’t want to know what you read. I want to know your ideas about what you read.” You could compare and contrast one element of a faith with your own beliefs (i.e., Christian ideas of justice versus Hindu ideas of justice). You could explore levels of meaning of one element of a faith (surface meanings and deep meanings of Talmud or Koran quotes). You could explore how Tantric attitudes toward sex are diametrically opposed to Christian ideas about sex, and imagine what having “moral sex” is like in both cultures (Tantric practices are fascinating). Are some of the things you do considered moral in one belief system but not in another? Explore that. You might find the Native American Church, with its sacred use of peyote, an interesting topic. Can you find God through substances? The one thing I do not want is 7-10 very generic pages on the history and basic beliefs of X. That is not a college-level paper. For example: not “The Life of Severus Snape,” but “How Love Both Destroys and Saves Snape’s Character.” You might worry that you won’t be able to fill 7-10 pages with what seems like a narrow topic, but believe me, there is a lot more to talk about in that second title than there is in the first.
There is a minimum of 5 sources, which you will analyze and comment on, required to support your paper, drawing from a variety of source materials: library books, journals, magazines, newsprint, credible web publications, interviews, etc. You are also welcome to use images, but there will be a maximum of 5 images–you must cite them as you would your other sources (in MLA format) and the space they take up does not count toward your seven-page minimum (if you have a half-page of pictures, then you need a minimum of 7 ½ pages total).
What counts as an impartial source when it comes to faith? What doesn’t? How do you tell the difference between the two? One important guideline: don’t use information about one religious group that is provided by an opposing religious group. Don’t use an evangelical Christian website to get information on Islam, or an atheist website to get information on Christianity. Get information directly from the people who practice it. You can look at what opponents say about a faith and analyze those statements to see whether or not their criticisms are accurate, but don’t let someone’s worst enemies be your primary source of information about them.
Paper Three – A Working Guide to a Meaningful Life 5-7 pages
This is a paper that I hope you will keep long after this class is over. As with Paper 1, “This I Believe,” the title here will be the title of your paper. I want you to create your own personal guide to living a moral life. You can draw reasons and examples from all the faiths we’ve studied or just from your own tradition. Try to write this paper as though you were looking at your own life at its very end, as though you were on your deathbed. In those final moments, what is of most value to you? What moral traits have you cultivated within yourself? How do you want to be remembered? Looking from that perspective, what does it mean to have experienced “a life well lived”? What choices will you make now that will set you on that road? As Joan Baez says, “You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.”
Of course we’ll all say, “I want to be kind to others.” Back that up with statements from your spiritual tradition, or with something you’ve learned in this class. What do the great traditions say about kindness? If you’re an atheist, the emerging field of neuroethics might be of some interest here. You may say that a meaningful life means working to protect life, while someone else might say it means working to protect freedom of choice. A meaningful life might be working to reduce belief in religion because it is divisive, or working to encourage more religion because it is a foundation for morality. Whatever sources you use to support your working guide, the guide itself is for you and should reflect your values.
enc_1145_course_policy_sheet.docx | |
File Size: | 43 kb |
File Type: | docx |
fall_2011_syllabus.xlsx | |
File Size: | 205 kb |
File Type: | xlsx |