Encountering Religions Project

Instructions

For this assignment you are expected to interview a member of a religion other than your own and report on this encounter. This means that if you are a member of one of the broad religious categories in the textbook you should learn about the religion of another religion entirely. For example, if you are Catholic or Protestant, you should encounter a religion other than another kind of Christianity. The same goes for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. This may involve some effort ahead of time to meet someone of another faith.

Learn what you can about the other religion: what people do, how it is represented, what significance their actions take. If you conduct an interview, ask the other person what they believe and how they live out their faith. Ask specific questions.

You must also present some documentary evidence of your encounter. For an interview, a name and contact email or phone number would suffice.

Finally, the interview must take place during the course. If you talked with a friend from another religion two years ago, that does not count for this project. You need to interview someone specifically for this project, during this course.

The Interview Paper

This assignment involves writing up your experience in a paper. This report should be 5-7 pages in length (typed, double-spaced, using 12-point Times New Roman font or equivalent). This report should very briefly describe the religion in question before describing your experience. It should include the major features mentioned above, but also mention passages in the textbook that present or explain these observations about the other religion. For example, you might observe a group of Buddhists meditating. You would note this distinctive feature of the group and say something like:

The textbook says that when a Buddhist is meditating he or she focuses on “a physical object or even a blank wall, but usually the focal point is the breath” (176). I later asked one of the members how they meditate and they

explained that they pay attention to their breathing.

When I grade I will be looking for clarity, detail, organization, and thoughtfulness in your essays. It helps to proofread what you have written before you submit it. You may wish to ask someone to read over your essay before submitting it to spot any areas that might need revision. As always, what you write needs to be in your own words, supplemented by references to the textbook. Copying and/or pasting from other sources without citing them properly is plagiarism and will result in failing.

To summarize:

Your Field Report should contain the following elements:

An introduction identifying the encounter. This provides a context for the essay. Identify your interviewee, his or her religion, the time and place of the interview, and any other relevant details to help us understand the context of the interview.
A brief summary describing the religion you encountered, quoting the textbook as necessary. Avoid using internet sources, though it is acceptable to sparingly quote from an official source affiliated with the religion, provided you cite it clearly.
Organize your essay around four main features that you learned from this interview. For each feature, describe what you observe or learned. Correlate this with what you have read (see the example above). You can describe more than four features, of course, but at least four should be clearly defined in some detail.
Conclude the essay with some thoughts or observations you may have about your experience.
References for citations made. This may be just the textbook, but be sure to cite any other sources used.
Submit some documentary evidence. For an interview, provide the date and location of the interview as well as the interviewee’s name and contact information (phone number or email will suffice).

Finally, please remember that all written material should be in your own words. Copying and pasting from online sources in place of your own work is plagiarism and will result in a zero. These essays will be reviewed by Turnitin software to check for potential instances of plagiarism.