Primal Religions 2018

        When we had class outside at Lion's Gate, we had a good discussion about the statue at the top of the hill. The statue commemorated a man who was responsible for making the space around it a place for the public to visit and enjoy. The statue was a very tall, geometric design of a man taming a horse with a bit in the horse's mouth on top. At the bottom of the sculpture, there are four sculptures of men holding different objects representing things we really value in American culture. One of the figures was holding a painter's palette with brushes to represent art, another figure was holding a compass with some paper to represent math/science, the third figure was holding an anvil to represent the trades that use this object for metalwork, and the fourth figure was holding a book by Homer to represent literature/storytelling. These four things represented the most important aspects of American culture at the time this sculpture was made.     ...

In case you were unaware, CNU hosts a dance concert every spring semester to celebrate the efforts and time commitments of members within the dance department. Because I have good friends and sisters in the dance show, I make sure to attend the event each year to show my support. The dance routines often depict a wide variety of styles and movements, from ballet to tap dancing. Most of the dancers, choreographers, and producers are students, which is extremely impressive because I cannot imagine what it takes to put on such a remarkable show. This year, one of the dance professors decided to choreograph her own routine alongside a project she has been working on regarding Haitian dance styles. The routine was the first dance of the second set, and I knew something truly amazing was going to happen before the music even began. The lights dimmed until the room was almost completely black, and then two large spotlights beamed onto the stage, illuminating a pair of bongos. A middle-aged ...

We listened to a song performed by a woman about the Celtic Diaspora. In this event, the Celtic people were forced to leave their homeland. The woman expresses the sadness and longing she had for her homeland in the song. She says that she lives far from where she is from, and that sometimes she can hear a voice calling out to her, guiding her back to the place where she belongs. We learned in class that the Gaelic word "duthchas" means a blood tie to a place that serves as a symbolic/metaphorical reference to home. The woman performing the song has a strong "duthchas" to her homeland. This connection to a place or "duthchas" is the point that which we orient ourselves around. This blood tie gives meaning and a concrete connection to one's family. After hearing this song, it made me think about my own homeland and the strong connections I have made to various places throughout my life. I have lived in many different places, but my childhood home in R...

In the film "Black Robe", we were able to see how the traditional oral culture of the Native Americans responded to the written culture of the French. In the beginning of the film, Black Robe asked one of the Native Americans to tell him something that the French wouldn't know so he could write it down on paper. Black Robe wrote down what they told him and let the other French man read it in front of them. The Native Americans were astounded that he was able to know what they said just by reading the paper. They called it magic and thought they were cursed because of their language. The Native Americans in the film obviously had a different spoken language than the French, but they also believed that nature spoke to them, imparting wisdom and instruction. I see that as a compensation for not having a written language. The Indians still sought information outside of them to know how to respond in certain situations and do what was best. For example, the Native American w...

Abram, David.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World . New York: Vintage Books, 1996. In Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous,  anthropologists studying the significance of storytelling in Native American culture find themselves amidst an Apache village in the Southwest United States. The anthropologists live with the Natives for quite some time, picking up the intricacies of their language and discovering the sacred locales of their homeland. Abram recounts a passage from one of the anthropologists: "Placeless events are an impossibility, everything that happens must happen somewhere. The location of an event is an integral aspect of the event itself, and therefore identifying the event's location is essential to properly depicting - and effectively picturing - the event's occurrence" (p. 161). For this Apache tribe, these places were maintained by oral stories and the natives could essentially relocate themselves to these l...

C.S. Lewis wrote "What flows into you from myth is not truth, but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is)." I had a hard time understanding the idea of myth in the context of faith because of the negative connotations the word has when it's associated with religion. However, if you think of myth as a meaningful story, it removes any idea that myth is not based on the truth. C.S. Lewis was saying that myth gives us symbolic accounts of the real, but that it isn't truth itself. In essence, myth to Lewis communicates God's reality. I thought this was very interesting language that I was not used to using when talking about the message of the Bible. Myth helps us as humans embrace mystery. Myths emphasize the mystery of symbols and how we can't fully explain reality. Dr. Redick's story of the troll under the bridge is a good example of a myth and how it can apply to our lives today. In his story, the troll represen...

In the film of the aboriginals in Australia, we learned about how this group of oral people made a spiritual claim over the land by painting their hand prints in a cave. Since this culture does not have written documents to legally lay hold of the land that rightfully belongs to them, they create their signatures on the physical land, claiming it as theirs. I thought this was very interesting to compare to our written culture. In our culture, there is an extensive amount of legality and bureaucracy that's involved in owning a piece of land. The system of the hand print in the oral culture could be compared to a deed in our written culture. Although the hand print is not a legally binding document, the people are making more of a spiritual claim or authority over the land. In essence, they are claiming the territory as theirs and marking it as a sacred place. I thought it was interesting how this system could also be compared to the situation of Mt. Rushmore in America. In class, ...

As everyone knows, Henry David Thoreau was one of the leading figures in the Transcendentalism movement in the United States during the eighteenth century. Living his life working odd jobs and writing books, Thoreau felt that many people suffer from a lack of connection with nature and, in order to change this suffering, we must revert back to prioritizing the natural world within our own humanness. In my American Religion class a few weeks ago, we talked about how Thoreau would take his students out on adventures in the great outdoors to experience nature themselves, rather than just reading about these experiences in books. This idea - along with most of Thoreau's philosophical stances - really resonated with me and reminded of this Primal Religions class. Thoreau found value in what many contemporary Americans tend to overlook or neglect: an innate connection with the natural world around us. Similar to Thoreau's vision, primal peoples enjoyed a close relationship with natur...