6th Semester, Week 11

This is one of my last blog posts, which is kind of surreal.  I cannot believe how my time at Loras has flown.  This blog post I am supposed to be reflecting on my practicum and the progress I have made with it.  For my practicum I have been mainly working with the Archdiocesan office of Adult Faith Formation.  I have been working with a woman named Mary Pedersen who is a recent hire.  I have been doing a menagerie of things for her.  One of the first things I did was do research regarding adult faith sharing, learning, and discipleship models.  While I did not think I would like to do mainly research, I actually found it fascinating and it opened my eyes to how complicated adult faith formation is.  When I say complicated I mean that there are so many factors that go into how a successful adult formation program is built.

 The next project I worked on was helping both the Archdiocese and Loras College restructure the lay formation program.  I was asked to research dioceses in the United States that were similar in size, demographics, majority rural areas, and Hispanic presence.  Then, after identifying similar diocese’s I was asked to take a close look at each of their lay formation programs and interview the person in charge of their program to understand how they built their program.  The dioceses that I ended up interviewing were Davenport, Lacrosse, and Winona.  After I did that I was asked to write up a proposal for possible curriculum changes in the program for the Archdiocese of Dubuque’s lay formation program. 

  The next and last large thing that I have been asked to work on is helping the Loras College Religious Studies department do research regarding wants and needs of parish leaders in the Dubuque area regarding continuing education and lay formation.  This project is still in progress, but we have our first interview group finalized for the second week of January and I have also just submitted a proposal for interview questions. 

 If you couldn’t tell already, my practicum is not on schedule.  Due to no fault of my own (verified by Dr. Waldmeir), I do not have enough hours to be able to complete my practicum for the end of the semester, so Dr. Waldmeir has kindly agreed to give me an incomplete and I will finish the practicum over J-term.  I will also do most of my writing of the portfolio over Christmas break and J-term.

 In regards to the topics that I plan to discuss when I present my capstone to the religious studies staff and students, I will probably talk about how I have learned through research and experience that adult faith formation is essential to help the whole Church flourish and how it is much more complicated than I first thought it was.  I also was planning on talking about my research work regarding the lay formation program in the Archdiocese.

Second Semester After Declaring Major. Week 6

I am ending my second semester as a religious studies major and and wrapping up a religious studies elective class called Religion and Consumer Culture.  Although this class is not listed in the three categories below, it would fit under Group Three.  This group talks about being able to use theology to interpret beliefs and practices- religious or more broadly cultural- within the contemporary world.  

In this class, we looked at different aspects that make up a religion and by comparing these to aspects of consumerism, we looked at the possibility of it actually being considered a religion.  In order to do this, we specifically looked at  consumerism through the eyes of Christians and Buddhists and some other ideologies such as Marx.  

By looking at consumerism through these different religions and ideologies, I was able to get a better understanding of how consumerism not only has beliefs and practices that is enforces, but it also can be compared and contrasted to the beliefs and practices of religions.  For example, consumerism tries to get consumers to believe that through the consumption of goods, all of their desires can be fulfilled.  When we compared this to the beliefs of Christians, we saw that Christians' beliefs would contrast this and say that consumerism can only fulfill some desires and when it does, they are short term.  Christians say that God has put a desire in everyone to know, love and serve Him and this desire cannot be fulfilled by material possessions regardless of what consumerism tries to convince us of; only he can fulfill this desire. 

Overall I thought this was a great class.  I learned a lot about religions through studying consumerism.  Maybe if consumerism was looked at in light of a few more religions other than Christianity and Buddhist, it would have given even more of a clear picture of its religious aspects and how other religions view consumerism.

Semester 2

This blog will look at the World Religions January Term class and how the various texts of the class were evaluated for religious and theological values according to both written and oral communication skills. One aspect that I really like about World Religions was that the "texts" of the class were not limited to actual written documents, although we did look at some of those, but included a wide variety of other medium. For instance, we analyzed the Matisyahu song "Jerusalem" for a paper and listened to other audio recordings,  we visited numerous religious sites and wrote blogs combing what we had seen with what we had read and  reflecting on the experience,  and we discussed each religion with an active, practicing member of that religion, again reflecting on it in our blogs. The variety of medium that we were able to use to learn about each religion really enhanced the class and broadened our learning beyond just reading analyzing words on a page.

This is not to downplay the importance and value of reading and analyzing written religious texts because I found that to be a very valuable part of the class as well, but to stress how much the variety added to the course. In fact I wish that we had been able to read and have a day to discuss each religion before visiting the religious site because this would have helped me to come in with more informed questions and a fuller background of the religious tradition we would be visiting. This was not always possible however due to scheduling and weather constraints.

Written competency was shown most heavily through the blogs I wrote reflecting on each of the sites we had visited. I think this was a good choice of medium because we were able to use pictures to add a visual component to our reflections and share our experiences with others in the class. Written competency was also shown through papers, such as the one on Matisyahu's song mentioned earlier and through our final project. Oral competency was shown mainly through the final presentation that we gave at a nearby nursing home. For the presentation we were split up into groups of three and had to put together an oral presentation, a poster, and an experiential component. For instance my project was on Zen Buddhism and my group and I prepared a presentation about how the Japanese Tea Ceremony reflected beliefs of Zen Buddhism complete with an abbreviated reenactment of the Tea Ceremony and green tea for guests to try. I also liked that instead of presenting our projects to just our classmates, we were able to go out into the Dubuque community and present them at a nursing home there to people who hadn't had three weeks of background in world religions.

I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to take World Religions as a January Term course and for the wide variety of forms of "texts" from written to audio to visiting actual religious sites that I was able to use to evaluate the equally wide range of religious and theological values I learned about.