AMERICAN-NACIREMA

trying to imagine a culture that would go to the temple to die - or see the human body as something hideous and only made to disease is hard. i mean, this is really hard to imagine .... until you realize it is your culture. this took what william paden said about 'interpretations' into full swing. i was shocked, appauled and wanted to help the people of this place called 'nacirema' but i guess that you cant help what you are fully indulged in. i am part of this place - i couldnt believe it. i made connects like thier daily mouth ritual and us brushing teeth and the place to die being the hospital - i just thought it all to be coincidence, apparently not. when i read this i saw it from my own perspective - with pity - and then when we talked about it being our everyday life in class i saw it from this anthropologist point of view i realized - truely - that everything in life is what you make it, even how we see our own lives. the funniest thing of the whole thing was when eric said, 'i wanted to send them money.' this our world through a lense that sees everything in a way they no one would of thought.
not only did i find this completely shocking but it really took the way we saw doubt, reading paden and our conversations into light - it made me feel like all the work ive been doing over the past couple of weeks came tp a peak - this was what i was supposed to realize.

something that is really intriging me is the Tibetan Buddists - but i will learn more.
journalism is something rather perfect. i love to write, its something i have always loved to do - i made a new friend who is absolutely wonderful and now i get to tell her story through my love of writing: how perfect is that. Michael Camp always has a way of taking our long days a the end and spicing them up just a little bit - touche on making us laugh.

its reflection time -

i read everyones blogs this weekend and i have realized that people have touched on thier failures to remember to blog - which is understandable because of the millions of websites we must keep track of. i although have blogged basically every week i have lacked on the most important thing meat. no, i am not talking about the delicious turkey i indulged in this weekend but the substance to my blogs. this class is nothing like i expected it to be - its three different worlds held together by 30 students and we make it go round. there are countless sites we have to keep track of, interesting things to read and people to listen to; all of which change our beliefs a little bit. this is what i find most incredible - that our beliefs are changed easily as well as the way we see, hold and voice them.
most importantly to this was the play doubt. i think it was in laurens cook blog where she says something about looking at the play for all three angles - journalistic, english and religiously. that was entireley the best part of this play. i walked out of the playhouse not knowing exactly what to think at all. my mind was boggled and i didnt know what to think; when i knew what to think and thought i was standing stall people just slightly pushed me so i wasn't steady anymore. after reading the play i thought sister aloysuis was very cold but i really wanted to believe that she was a good person - deep down somewhere. i believed that father flynn wasn't capable of doing such a horrible thing in my heart...but my mind knew elsewise. sister james and me were the same person. now, i think - after listening to michael higgins and him giving us so much insight we didn't have - that she was right in her doings. she was in a position of power and yes, she didnt need to be so cold, but she didnt have time to stop and find truth - jsut act. i think father flynn did it. just that simple.
something i thought was completley thoguht provoking was what justin said, about doubts - he said that in his life people have made him doubt his own actions and made him question something he thought he knew. was this happening to father flynn - was sister aloysuis making him think... did i do something wrong? when he actually hadn't.
basically my mind has been pulled a bunch of different ways in this class... and i absolutely love it. :)

BLOGGEEED!

there is something interesting about aquinas - that we can step into a classroom and almost know that that day would be nothing like the last.Aquinas this week was intersting - our first FULL week being split up into our specific classrooms. We had a big taste of the play Doubt - what is it, how we say it and how others say it. The best, and most interesting part, was when we had to pull out how someones beliefs would have showed them a different way of seeing a scene in the play. I carefully picked my two scenes and went away. I had quite a few response, many agreeing and some just plain not. Another thing that really, honestly, struck a chord in me is that we will forever be interacting with each other. That there will never be something that I write that people in my class won't have connection to.
Journalism took a big spin - its alot different from the English and Religious Studies that we go through in the morning. Michael Camp has a great way of reaching us - even in the dead of the afternoons when we are all awaiting our beds for naps, or backpacks for homework. On Thursday though, Camp pulled on our heart strings and really showed us the demented view of our society and how we - as a society - have a ranking system of what is more important. A 8 year old child stuck in a building or a 28 year old stuck in a building. Even more disturbing if we simply added details we realized that the media emphasis' what would pull the heartest strings.
This class is on going and interesting - althought sometimes frustrating. I was posting about a 'what a community newspaper should do' and my computer froze when I hit POST, twenty minutes down the drain. I was so upset and beside myself. I find myself doing this with some prompts or that fact that we have so many forums, websites and tasks to keep track of - I guess that is university right.
until next time! b.moore xo

It's Been Blogged -

This week I learned two single important things - nothing is ever written in stone without exceptions and ... don't just stop at the Internet - USE books, dabble in the past! One of the best things we did this week was sit in a circle and debate, listen and take in each others point of views on the Genocide and exactly how we individually feel it - I felt that no one, no one wants to be bad, or do bad things. I think that the people, like Munyaneza, were taught wrong along the way - maybe someone simply whispered one line that wrote out their future and maybe this was his solid thought of right from the moment he could learn - birth. Yes, it is easy to argue the he knew what he was doing was wrong - how could you not, raping woman and killing children. But, I think that they saw it was justifiable and maybe even heroic to their culture. To see a classroom so heated, so pounding with the want to understand 'beliefs' and difference is almost time stopping. I walked out of that class room with my mind still running.

The genocide was something horrible, almost unimaginable but it taught us alot of things that we wouldn't have otherwise learned - from as big as a 'moral compass' to as small as learning how to use the library in our back yard. Both two very different sides of the Richter scale but both important.

Splitting up is normally a bad term used to explain when something doesn't mesh well together - like sally Joe and john in kinder garden or the marriage that just failed - but in our case it was something different, a new spice that we all loved. We had our first day of individual Aquinas classes and it was different was perfect - everything I imagined. Each teacher has something important to teach us in their own way over the next couple of months, and I can barely wait.

Britttttanyyy.