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.

Let's Blog; RWANDA.

To be someone's daughter for 18 years, you think that you know everything about them. Well, I learned that you don't, until you asked questions. If we had never touched on Rwanda Genocide I would have never learned that my dad, who is my world, went there was I was just 3 years old... for 'computer communications' and actually came back with the training to properly body bag humans. I never knew my dad ever saw the horror that was the Rwanda Genocide, until now. To be honest, I didn't know much about the entire genocide at all until this article was brought up - now, I am going to get the book 'Shake Hands With The Devil' and can't stop researching, asking questions. I learned alot of the past of Hutus and Tutsis and that it isn't always easy to point a blaming picture. I learned that when I was just three, there were innocent people being slaughtered while I was in my sandbox in delight. I also learned that I have alot emotion towards hate, killing, justified killing through war and the real difference between a war and a genocide; every single person is important.
Besides the horror that is the Rwanda Genocide I learned how to research, how to research deeper and how to look where I have never looked before. We are so quick to turn to the internet and the unreliable wikipedia for answers that are very much to complex to answer with one source.


The week was interesting, it was nonstop - and it still isn't over.

B.Moore

Let’s Blog – Truth In Society - September 10th to 18th

Truth in Society – three words that scared the hell out of me when used in a sentence until I witnessed and experience my first class. I guess I didn’t know what to expect stepping into the world of university and even further into a programme specifically designed for first year students. I had alot of questions related to the course but instead of asking them I tucked them into my mind and just waited for the answer to come. I should’ve question. I’m glad I didn’t – Truth in Society so far, when looked at in bulk – has already been quite the shift from high school. Right now we have three professors teaching us in a room of 30 students, 30 completely different personalities and minds. We are not only asked to write, something that I love, but not it is part of the ‘curriculum’ to witness the life that is revolving still around us as we strut through university – that from the start is why it should be on the pedestal it is.
Although only just a few short, yet interesting, days into this whole idea of ‘truth’ in our society my mind hasn’t stopped running, jogging at times and full tilt others – never stopping. The first thing I learned was this was going to be an experience of a lifetime – I get the vibe it’s going to be heated, heavy and nonstop work. I use the word ‘work’ loosely. What’s work if you enjoy it? This was like the seven days of Christmas in a way – instead of gifts, I learned. On day one I realized that not many other people in the room want the same thing as I; to better understand the world around me, to really understand how we believe what we do, to touch on ‘taboo’ subjects with a gentle heart and to take three completely different courses and make them click into something larger – larger than you or I. I also learned on this day that there are people who take questions that seem miniscule and write with everything they have to give a intriguing answer as I loved to do, writing as an art form. I learned this through our first prompt and working with it. I also learned that this would be one of the most realistic and most ‘home hitting’ programmes I would take as I read through the website, although it doesn’t look easy. On day two in our circle I saw everyone as a person, not just as strangers, and that Jay Scott agrees with me and some ‘unknown’ writer in class that we can explore everything that is unspoken about with sensitivity and open minds. The circle triggered a lot of emotions and thoughts – I loved reading these words of other people reaching out. I think that we noticed in this circle that we are all in boxes but as Justin said ‘What are these boxes and how did we get into them. And how do we get ourselves out.’ I personally think, and hope this will be something we will figure out for ourselves as we step out of those boxes. Day three as we looked at articles that related to our fellow colleagues I was put at a halt. There are so many things going on in our world that I haven’t seen. I don’t know if I have just be blinded by my own world therefore making me ignorant to not being able to reach out and relate or if this is my first step to getting out of my box. Some of the most interesting things were brought up in the articles that just held my attention; Someone is on trial for a genocide that happened what seems like a lifetime ago – the deserve justice, more than once was I reminded about medical further medical advances and a story that hit my heart about a murder of a student. Already my horizons are being expanded.
Truth in Society was three words that made me nervous for this new adventure in my life called University. But, it has only been three days or so and I am already reaching out to parts of the world, through writing and reading, which were once just a vague blurr in my mind and heart. This is most important to me because I am learning that I believe one thing about the world, my society and by having a clearer vision of these other places and other personalities I am seeing question graze through my head about what I really know. In four short days, I learned a lifetime. I can’t wait for what is next.
Sincerely Yours,
B.Moore