Primal Religions 2018

From The Healing Power of Heritage, Monitor on Psychology (pp. 44-51) One of the most complicated problems that modern psychologists and psychiatrists aim to tackle is that of culturally-sensitive mental/emotional support. Considering the ethnic conglomeration of people in all nations, particularly in the melting pot of the United States, the struggles and experiences which one endures are commonly tied to their personal backgrounds. This is especially difficult for Native Americans because of the mental health issues which their communities so commonly face. According to Mental Health America (2010), Native Americans suffer from serious psychological distress at a rate 1.5 times higher than the average population, and abuse alcohol and other drugs at younger ages and higher rates than all other ethnic groups in the United States. Despite these blatant dilemmas, mental health support and advocacy in Native American communities is severely lacking. A root issue of this is modern psy...

Stephanie Kaza , “ Penetrating the Big Pattern ,” Buddhist-Christian Studies , Vol. 23, (2003), pp. 55-59. (JSTOR) In this article, Stephanie Kaza delves into the trials of her religious journey. Her first spiritual experience, she states, was her discovery of light as a young child. "I was sitting on the second-story of our house in Buffalo, New York, at age five, spellbound by the dancing shadows of the big apple tree. Shimmering leaves, light and dark changing by the second - alive, dynamic, radiant, and mesmerizing. Across the afternoon the light shifted, the sun dropping lower in the sky. Some big pattern penetrated my young consciousness. What was it?" (p. 2).  This experience represents the essence of primal religion in two ways: first, that the senses were heavily relied upon for religious understanding due to lack of written language; second that the natural world was often explained through mythology.  To begin with, primal peoples were unable to use written l...

January 24, 2018 One of the most interesting discussions that we've had in class so far was that regarding the pen. Yes, the pen. What is a pen? It is a writing utensil, filled with ink. How would you describe a pen? Oblong, light, smooth, easy to hold. What is the purpose of the pen? To write things, to record things, to doodle on your notebook during that extremely boring math class. These questions, at first glance, appear tedious and overly simple. But what if it was the president's pen? The definition, description, and purpose of the pen has not changed, but the meaning  of the pen has changed. A pen belonging to an ordinary student has limited meaning (sorry guys, don't take it personally). But a pen belonging to the president absolutely has deeper meaning: you can sell it for a copious amount of cash, you can brag about it to all of your friends. How does this happen? How can such a seemingly arbitrary object take on such tremendous meaning? In Turner's ...

We discussed in class how myths can been seen as being prior to, or necessary for, true statements about the world. A key heuristic to understanding this concept, for me, was to think of myths as performing an exploratory function, instead of an explanatory one. The myth then becomes the contextualizing framework through which we can form beliefs and intentions about the world. Myths provide the semantic ground for our beliefs because they are the semantic ground that builds order out of chaos and allows our intentional attitudes to stick  to the world in a meaningful way. It seems to me that the key mechanism by which myth can perform this role is by allowing an individual to universalize her personal experiences and see in them a pattern or principle that she can then apply to the world. In this way the myth is the primary mode of communication between individuals of a culture: its narrative significance in a culture is what enables persons to relate to one another's particular...

Welcome to the 2018 Primal Religions class blog. Make sure to start the blog with your name and the subject of the entry (just as I have done with this post). Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections that relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has while reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or from informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The student should bring ques...