CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Deloria Writing Prompt (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To reflect upon the course texts in preparation for thoughtful discussion
  2. To organize thoughts into a concise and cohesive response to a targeted question
  3. To consider multiple viewpoints about ideas

The Assignment

Please read the questions below and answer them in marginalia form, at about the length of a 1-2 paragraph response. Pick two short passages, quote each one, and annotate it with an observation, a question, and a connection. Then boil your reading down to one aphorism of your own, and add a counterargument note against it, supported by a quote. Submit your annotations and aphorism through Canvas before the start of class.

Marginalia is the default here, and it applies to Questions 1 and 3, where you may swap in any of the other four genres (analytic, letter, dialogue, marginalia+aphorism, or the Four A’s) as long as you keep the quote and the counterargument. The remaining question asks for a specific artifact we use in class, so please submit that one in the form described.

If Deloria’s argument is hard to follow, How to Read Hard Texts in CIE will help you track it.

Writing Prompt

  1. Deloria contrasts religions oriented around time (history, prophecy, a coming end) with religions oriented around space and place. Explain this distinction with a quotation, and discuss why Deloria thinks it matters for how a people treats the land it lives on.

  2. Build a Sacred Place Inventory entry, which we use in class. Name one place that matters to you. In one sentence, say whether what makes it matter is an event that happened there or the place itself. Then locate it on Deloria’s axis, temporal or spatial, and support that placement with a quotation from the reading.

  3. Ursinus sits on land long inhabited by the Lenape people. What would it mean for the college, and for you as a member of it, to take that history seriously rather than ceremonially?

Submission

Please submit a word processed or PDF document.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.